I’m a major reviser of songs. I think it’s important to spent time and effort to shape the song beyond what originally emerged when I got an idea or started writing. I do a lot of the revising as I’m writing itself, but there are almost always placeholder words or phrases that I put into the song to get it done, and don’t intend to leave there forever. Or other things I notice that might not be exactly right after I start playing the song for other people. Right now I have a lot of songs that are almost done but have a few words or lines that I don’t think are as quite right. Many of them were written for challenges with short deadlines (like February Album Writing Month (FAWM) or a Fearless Songwriter Week) so there was reason to declare them done enough and move on. What I should probably do is pick some stretch of time to be my “song revision week,” in which I take up and fix a bunch of these almost-done songs, or, alternately, decide that they’re not worth fixing. (Though in those cases what I really should do is revise them first and only then decide if they’re worth keeping.) Stay tuned: if I do declare such a project, I’ll almost certainly blog about it. What’s harder is deciding what to do with songs that are in my repertoire but may still have some jagged edges. Peter Mulvey talks about a period of time before the song is set, when you can still do some revising, but after that point it is what it is and it doesn’t really make sense to go back and change it. Although there are few songs I’ve edited long after they initially made it out into the world (even a couple I’ve changed slightly from how they were recorded on CD), I think there’s something to that. If it didn’t feel finished enough to me, I wouldn’t play in public more than once or twice. And once I have, it feels like that is how the song is supposed to be. The song I’m wrestling with this issue on right now is I Remember (Bus to Manzanar), a song inspired by a photo of a young Japanese-American girl sitting on some luggage waiting for the bus to internment during World War II. I wasn’t even sure when I initially wrote it whether it would be a keeper, but it’s become one of my favorite songs from this year’s FAWM. I have edited it since I wrote it – a word tweak or two and, most significantly, going from a refrain that ended “I remember, I remember” to one in which I only sing the phrase once and then play it musically, creating more space and sounding a bit like remembering. That made a big difference. I had one placeholder word in it that I haven’t found a substitute for. In the lines “we had just two days from when we got the notice/ to store or to sell what we couldn’t convey” the last word has multiple meanings and I knew the one I meant was not the one most people would initially hear. Interestingly, just now I looked it up in a variety of online dictionaries and the meaning I wanted – “to carry” – is indeed the first definition given. But it’s probably not the meaning people these days are most likely to bring to mind when they hear the word. Its rhyming line, though, is one of my favorites (and one that has gotten the most positive feedback): “Mama sewed duffels to carry our clothing/ and made me wear three shirts that day,” and that makes it harder to change the one word because I’d likely have to change the surrounding words. I’ve also had feedback from a songwriter whose instincts I trust that there are one or two other words in the song that don’t sound like they would be uttered by a young girl (I think the specific words are “playthings” and “belongings”). Now, on the one had, the song is told once she is older and remembering, so it’s not unreasonable that she’d have the vocabulary of someone no longer a child. On the other hand, because the story unfolds through her memories of being a child, I can see the advantage of sticking to phrases she might have said. (I suppose there’s also the question of whether those words actually are ones a child in that era wouldn’t have uttered; they don’t stick out as much to me as they do to the person who made that observation.) But none of that may matter if the song has set. At this point I’m pretty attached to the song the way it is. If any of those words felt truly inappropriate – or if I had fixes that I loved – I would change them, but they feel like part of the song, so they may end up staying.