What to keep, what to throw out
Okay. Last time we read our own song back like a stranger. Tonight we do something with what you found.
Because reading it back is only useful if you're willing to cut.
The first song I ever finished was about my dad's tractor. Eleven verses. Every gear, every dent, the year he bought it, the year he sold it, what he said the day it broke down for good. I thought I was being thorough. I played the whole thing for Jill, all eleven verses, and when I finished she looked at me for a second and said, "that's a lot of tractor."
She wasn't being mean. She was right. I cut it to three verses and it was a better song. Not almost as good — better. The tractor didn't need eleven verses to matter. It needed the three that actually said something.
That's the lesson tonight. Most songs are twice as long as they should be. Say the thing, then stop. Nobody has ever once complained that a song was too short. I've never heard it happen. People complain about songs being boring, which is usually the same complaint wearing a different shirt.
How to actually do this
Get your song in front of you — the whole thing, verses and chorus, written out.
Step one: find the verse that's carrying weight, and find the ones that aren't.
Go verse by verse and ask: if I cut this one, does the song lose something, or does it just lose length? Be honest. Usually one or two verses are doing real work — they've got the image, the turn, the line you actually built the song around. The rest are often just... more of the same thing said a different way. Restating instead of building.
Step two: cut, don't patch.
If a verse isn't earning its place, don't try to save it by tweaking a word here or there. Take the whole thing out. See how the song reads without it. Almost every time, it's fine. Usually it's better, because now the verse that follows lands harder — it's not competing with three verses that already said something close to the same thing.
Step three: watch for the verse that's just there to explain the verse before it.
This is the sneaky one. You write something a little unclear, so you write another verse to clarify it. Cut the second one. If your song needs a verse to explain another verse, the fix isn't more words. It's going back and fixing the first verse, or trusting the listener more than you are right now.
Step four: read the chorus against every verse you kept.
Sometimes cutting verses shows you the chorus doesn't fit as well as you thought. That's fine to notice now, before you've built more on top of it.
The part people resist
I'll tell you what happens almost every time in this room. Somebody cuts a verse and immediately wants to argue for it. "But that one has the best line in the whole song." Maybe it does. Doesn't mean it belongs where you put it. Sometimes the best line in a cut verse is the seed of your next song entirely. That's not wasted, that's saved. I keep a notebook in my truck for exactly this — lines and verses that got cut from one thing and turned out to be the start of something else. Nothing you write down is ever really wasted, unless you throw the notebook away too.
The tractor song, if I'd never cut it, would still be sitting in a drawer being eleven verses nobody ever heard. Three verses got sung. That's the whole difference. A song that exists at three verses beats a song that's still bloated and unfinished at eleven.
I'll also say — cutting is not about making the song smaller for its own sake. It's about making sure every line you kept is one you'd defend. If you can't tell me why a verse needs to be there, it probably doesn't.
Tonight in class, bring the song you've been building. We're going to go through it out loud, verse by verse, and you're going to have to make the case for each one staying in. If you can't make the case, out it goes. I won't be gentle about this one. I wasn't gentle with my own tractor song either, eventually.
Before next time
Cut your song down by at least one verse before you come back — even if it hurts a little. Bring what's left, not what you started with. 🙏