I totally and 100%
agree with the concept of re-writes... and here's why.
Most of my best songs to date are songs that I re-wrote. There's absolutely no reason to trash an entire song just because,
at the time, you weren't able to think of anything better for the verse or chorus or whatever.
What happens to me (quite frequently, I might add) is I'll write a song and the verse (or the chorus or what have you) will really be "doin' it for me"... but I just won't have anything great to accompany it, so I just write something "so-so" to go along with it. I used to think that once a song is done it's "done".
But then, one day, I went back and looked at and old song with a chorus that I really liked, and I realized that the verse was just ruining the song. Then I perused through my other stuff and notice that I had a song with a good verse but lousy chorus that would fit perfectly with that chorus. So I did a little cut and paste, and voila... a new song.
I've re-composed about 5 songs now by using old verses/choruses combined with newer choruses/verses... and in every instance, the end product is
much better than the either of the originals.
I have a goal to someday go through all my old songs, pick out the parts of the song (verse, chorus, melody, lyric, etc.) that are "diamonds in the rough" and see if I can compile some good songs by using the "better" components of my past tunes.
I understand that this doesn't always work. Don't get me wrong... if you match the wrong verse with the wrong chorus, you'll end up sounding like a schizophrenic... what I'm talking about is sometimes as simple as taking a great melody from an old verse and applying that to a song with a newer, better chorus. My older stuff is almost all about the same subject, so it's easy for me to mix-and-match verses and choruses since they don't often stray to far from each other in terms of content. Most of the time, all I have to do is modify a few lines here and there to maintain fluidity in the song.
I posted a song a while ago called
Better.... and you can't tell by listening to it... but the verse was written aboot
6 years before the bridge and the chorus. The original chorus was so lousy and vacuous that it ruined the decent melody/lyric of the verse... and one day I was humming the chorus for Better in my head and I didn't have a verse yet... and for some reason, it occurred to me that the verse of an old song would go great with it... and it did.
I would encourage anyone to at least consider re-writes... you never know how much life you can breathe into your old stuff just by adding a new twist to it. Just make sure you know when to draw the line. If it's a turd, and there's nothing to salvage, you gotta know when to cut your losses and move on.
WATYF