Out of my hands

Something nobody warns you about: the day a song comes out, it stops being yours.

I don't mean that sadly. I mean it literally. Right up to release, a song is a thing I control completely — I can move a line, cut a chorus, decide it isn't ready. The morning it goes out, all of that ends, and the song becomes whatever it is to whoever hears it.

People tell me what my songs are about. They're usually wrong, in that it isn't what I was writing about, and usually right, in that it's plainly what the song says to them. Somebody told me one of the beach songs got them through a bad winter up north. I had never once thought of it as a winter song. Now I can't hear it any other way.

That's the trade. You give up the meaning and you get the reach. A song that only ever means the one thing you intended is a song that never left your house.

So I've stopped correcting people. If somebody tells me what a song is about, they're telling me something true — maybe not about the song, but about them, and they got there through something I made on an ordinary afternoon.

That's better than being understood.