I've been working for the last two days on "The Far Side of Town." It's so nebulous right now. I'm not even sure if that's what the song is called.
It started life, as many of my songs do, as just a musical idea that I fleshed out in Logic with nonsense lyrics. Then I added some lyrics so that I could start performing it, but I found that the way the original was recorded, as much as I liked it, didn't work live. I had to change the melody of the chorus and revamp the structure.
So now I have these two very different versions of essentially the same song. That's what happens, I guess, when you make the switch from a virtual band of unlimited instruments to a group of 1-4 actual people. But the question becomes, how do you reconcile them? Do you treat the live version like a software fork, letting each one develop separately based on its own needs and trajectory? Or do you try to combine the two, making one master version that will work in both settings?
Hmm. More on this as it develops.