A singer-songwriter challenge: Going back to those old songs

I had a great weekend performing with my duo, Sweet Bitters, in Portland, Maine — where my singing partner, Nina Schmir, will soon be moving. We still plan to be active as a duo, but I am also hoping to get back to performing solo occasionally, and hope to set up my first on-my-own performance in nearly two years.

As part of that effort, I’m working to resurrect a bunch of songs from my previous two solo albums. And there’s the rub — how do you go back to old songs that were written with lots of personal meaning, when that meaning, and period of time, has passed?

For example, I released an entire album of songs in 2004 that were nearly all inspired by a divorce I had gone through the year before. Some of them were fiercely personal, intimate and vulnerable, to the point that I stopped singing a few of them after a lot of time had passed and I had moved on to a new relationship. It seemed strange to sing a melancholy, bittersweet song of my own personal loss when I was now so happy!
Now, however, I’d like to get back to singing those tunes — I like them, other people seem to enjoy them, and I think they’re pretty well-written. But I still hesitate a bit…will it seem odd to perform the songs?
I’m sure most songwriters go through this process…I can only imagine how famous songwriters, with millions of fans clamoring to hear their hits, feel about performing tunes from their catalog that were about personal experiences that they don’t necessarily want to relive.
Have you ever had this experience? If so, how have you — or how do you — handle it?

Tagged as: singer-songwriter, songwriting

  • Ryan Knott

    I, too, run into this a lot. Many of the songs I perform were written ten years ago or more and many have to do with various break-ups, etc. Now that I'm married, it's difficult to convince my wife that just because those songs are about a period in my life that is long gone, that doesn't mean that I'm somehow still pining for the person they're about or that I'm not "over" it.

    For me, the bottom line is: If the song is still good, it's worth playing.

  • Brian Kendig

    I agree with Ryan, play the songs. A good song is just that, a good song.

  • cinderkeys

    Thirded. A good autobiographical song is an emotional record of the event. Singing one of those songs after you've gained closure isn't the same as reopening the wound.

    At most, songs that are less relevant to my current life make me want to write new songs. They don't make me want to scrap the old ones.

  • MAB

    The bottom line is that every song is a work of fiction. No matter how personal, no matter how plucked from the day's headlines, it is a piece of art that is constructed to fit a specific format. The lyric may be 50% "true", 100% "true" or 0% "true". It doesn't matter. It's a song. It may have been composed for therapeutic reasons but once it goes out into the world it becomes its own thing. It isn't yours anymore and the emotions that inspired it belong to you in your personal life but in the rest of the world they belong to the song. Let them exist there and enjoy the fact that you don't need to experience them anymore, other than as an artist.

  • Stephen

    If you want to do it, it comes down to acting. You don't have to do method acting. You can "just act". It's a matter of behaving like you mean it.

    I don't suppose you can do a duet over skype.