"The Whole World"
In which I try to scrape the “ick” off an otherwise promising song I’d abandoned ten years ago.
Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.
Today’s installment finds me in a Detroit motel on a day off, and I’ve been inspired by a tweet sent out by my friend John Moe. His observation was simple and true and went sorta viral.
It spurred a memory of a song I wrote a decade ago called “The Whole World,” which found the narrator marveling at this very idea. Of course, true to form, I made the song’s narrator a sad, creepy stalker-type character.
WHY DO I DO THAT?!?
Why did this song never find a home? Oh, I have a pretty good idea why…
Is it the quadruple usage of the words “Waffle House?” Maybe.
Is it the use of the super-funny word “internets” (which, honestly, just reading that word makes me sad)? Maybe. Because dad jokes are the wrong kind of sad. But that’s not really a song-killer—just a meh lyric.
The “boys have always wanted to make sweet, sweet love with girls who do not know that they exist” line is just a lot. Even if I was to change it from “to girls” to “with girls” it wouldn’t do much to soften the ick factor. That line is a real problem.
But the dingdingding winner is the creepy narrator! The guy who’s stalking some poor girl in the choruses? What was I even thinking? To be fair, this was about a year before I chose sobriety, so I definitely wasn’t thinking as clearly as I could have back then.
Now, ten years later, as I gear up to become an actual PROFESSOR of songwriting, I’m even more interested in what makes some songs “successful” (by which I mean artistically rather than commercially), and I’m about to spend a whole semester proselytizing to students about the glory of revision. I believe it’s true that a piece almost never comes out perfect immediately—it usually takes many passes, failures and false starts before a song works.
So I challenged myself today to repair “The Whole World.” (Boy, that sounds like a mighty undertaking.)
Truth be told, I almost sent out a version of this missive with a performance of the problematic original version as the ONLY version, but I chose instead to let this be a teaching moment for myself as much as y’all. I spent some time on the rewrite. I don’t think it’s all the way there yet, but it’s definitely less, um, creepy?
Here’s the updated “The Whole World.”
I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts on how it turned out.
yrs,
Rhett
Revision is so interesting. I love what Hemingway said about writing being like an iceberg, only 1/8 of it showing above the water. And then, of course there’s Anne LaMott’s “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.” But my favorite image connected to revising is something I read once, I don’t remember where, about an artist who had a friend, I think his name was Balthazar, who would dance around behind the painting, pointing out things that needed to be changed, the implication being that we all have that kind of internal Balthazar. I also love the idea that if you ask yourself something about your writing (Is it too ____? Should I ____?), the answer is probably yes.
I like the song, good job. 👏
Much improved, IMO. I love that the narrator went from the creepy stalker type you mentioned and its more of an unrequited love gone right kind of situation. Also, I really like the alliteration of "schoolbooks, bibles, baby clothes and bassinets" better than "funeral parlors, public schools, and bassinets".
Lastly and most importantly, ending the song on "we'll stay there til the whole world stops" instead of "cos it's the last place you can smoke inside" emphasizes the theme of the song...while the intro to the song is a world smelling like cigarettes, that was just a way of introducing a world where "he" never knew "her"....and now that they do, they'll stay together forever.