Four years of easy, harmonious collaboration. Then one afternoon over a single chorus line, everything got considerably more complicated.
My longtime co-writer and I had our first genuine creative disagreement today after four full years of writing together without a single real conflict, a genuinely uncomfortable afternoon spent arguing, politely but with real underlying tension, over a single chorus line neither of us was willing to simply concede on, and I have spent the hours since trying to work out honestly what that specific fight actually revealed about a creative partnership I had, until today, considered close to entirely conflict-free.
We have written probably sixty songs together over these four years, a genuinely productive, easy partnership built on what I had always assumed was a remarkably compatible creative sensibility, rarely disagreeing on much beyond minor, easily resolved preferences about phrasing or melody, the kind of low-stakes creative differences that get worked out amicably within minutes rather than escalating into anything resembling today’s genuinely tense standoff over one specific chorus line I felt strongly needed to stay exactly as originally written, and that he felt equally strongly needed a fairly significant rewrite.
I think what made today genuinely difficult, beyond simply the disagreement itself, was discovering, after four years of assuming otherwise, that we actually hold somewhat different underlying philosophies about what makes a chorus line genuinely work, a difference that had simply never surfaced clearly before because our previous sixty songs had never required us to actually test it directly against each other this explicitly. I favor, I realized today, a certain directness and simplicity in a chorus hook, while he leans toward something more layered and lyrically dense, a difference in taste that had apparently been quietly, invisibly present across our entire partnership without either of us fully noticing it until today’s specific song forced the underlying tension into the open.
We did not resolve it today, if I am honest, ending the session with the song genuinely unfinished and a slightly awkward, considerably more formal goodbye than our usual easy parting after a normal writing day. I called a mutual friend and fellow songwriter this evening, partly to vent and partly to get an outside, more removed perspective on whether this kind of disagreement is actually a normal, healthy part of a long creative partnership, or a genuinely concerning sign that our specific collaboration has simply run its natural course after four productive years together.
She offered a genuinely useful reframing I have been sitting with since, that a creative partnership this long running entirely conflict-free for four straight years was, in her own considerable experience writing with various partners over the years, actually somewhat unusual, and that today’s disagreement, uncomfortable as it clearly was, might actually represent a healthy, overdue deepening of the partnership rather than any kind of warning sign about its future, provided we both actually engage with the underlying disagreement honestly rather than simply papering over it to preserve the easier, more harmonious dynamic we had gotten used to.
I think she is probably right, though I will admit sitting with that reframing tonight does not fully dissolve the specific discomfort of today’s actual argument, or the genuine uncertainty about how exactly we pick this unfinished song back up when we next sit down together. I have texted him already, a short message simply saying I have been thinking about his specific point on the chorus and want to genuinely reconsider it properly rather than just defending my own original version out of stubbornness, a message I mean sincerely even though I am still not entirely sure, tonight, which version I will actually land on once we sit back down together.
Four years, sixty songs, and our first real fight, over a single chorus line that will, I suspect, end up considerably better for having actually been fought over properly rather than simply settled quickly the easy way we have always settled our smaller disagreements before. I am choosing, tonight, to treat today as a genuine, if uncomfortable, sign of a partnership deepening rather than one beginning to fray, though I will admit I will feel considerably more confident in that read once we have actually finished the song properly and can look back on today from the other side of it.
He texted back within the hour, considerably faster than I expected given how the session actually ended, saying he had been doing the exact same thing on his end, replaying my original argument for the simpler, more direct version and finding himself genuinely less certain of his own position than he had felt walking out of the studio earlier today. That mutual, simultaneous reconsideration feels like a genuinely good sign, two people who each, independently and without any prompting from the other, spent the evening actually taking the other’s argument seriously rather than simply digging in further out of pride.
We are getting back together properly on Thursday to try finishing the song, and I find myself, tonight, genuinely curious rather than anxious about how it will actually land once we sit back down, curious whether we end up compromising somewhere between our two original positions, or whether one of us ends up genuinely persuaded by the other’s argument entirely. Either outcome feels, tonight, like a legitimate, healthy way for a four-year partnership to actually grow, rather than the warning sign my earlier, more anxious read of today’s events had initially suggested.
More from this author at Camden Rose, prat.uk.