SONGWRITING
REMNANTS , FRAGMENTS & GHOSTS | Kevin MacDougall
It ’ s a cruel twist of fate that lately I have been focusing this column on song rewrites and additions that can be carried out long after a song is initially finished .
Last month , I returned home from a trip to find that my computer ’ s hard drive was gone . It was complete toast . And this wouldn ’ t have been such a big deal but for the fact that my backup hard drive had died a couple months prior . I hadn ’ t gotten around to replacing the backup , and I hadn ’ t gotten around to copying key folders into a cloud-based service that I already pay for .
You see where this is going .
I lost everything .
All of it . Demos , lyrics , and chord sheets to most everything I ’ d written in the past chunk of years … all of it gone .
Like most writers , I ’ ve written a lot more than what has been recorded or published . And a lot
of that work is my favorite work I ’ ve done . Work that no one knows but me . What are the odds of having two hard drives working well and then doing this to a person within so short a span of time ? Whatever they are , I hit those odds . I thought I had time , and I didn ’ t . A classic cautionary tale .
I am now trying to recapture what I lost . I ’ m jotting down song titles as I remember them , searching my iPhone notes where the kernel of some songs began , thumbing through journals and scraps of paper , and filling in all the lyrics and chord changes I can , trying to get back to where things were .
But at the same time , I know that I ’ ll never get there . I don ’ t have a full memory of this work in my head . Like many of the faces you see in the halls at school that fade over time , all I have are remnants . Fragments . I have the ghosts of songs past haunting me , whispering lyrical phrases but not entire sections , and tapping me on the shoulder when I try to play through a chord progression and it ’ s not quite the right chord voicing I keep returning to .
And for now , that will have to be enough .
When it comes to the “ final ” versions of my songs , I ’ m a very digital person . What begins in a notebook is ultimately completed at a computer , and that ’ s the file I ’ ll return to over the years with tweaks and changes . So I ’ m not being overly dramatic when I say that “ the loss ” represents a significant amount of material , and there ’ s a real grief associated with it , as anyone who has written for any length of time can imagine . I ’ m sitting with that grief and sorting through the wreckage . I ’ ve moved through much of my shock , denial , and anger so far , and into the bargaining and depression part of the process . I ’ m trying to get a sense of what ’ s next , and I ’ m looking for where the light shines through .
To borrow a phrase that I ’ ve heard Cornel West offer : I ’ ve never been much of an optimist , but I am a prisoner of hope . And in view of finding the hope that remains for me as an artist in