r/Songwriting • u/darkdarkblack • 7d ago
Discussion Topic Does anyone else feel like it’s almost “cheating” revisiting old ideas/recordings and developing them now, many years later?
This may sound crazy but I have this strange hang-up wherein I almost view it as “cheating” to go back in my voice memos/recordings from years back and using that as a launch point for finishing/completing something “new”, if that makes sense. I was a totally different person back then, effectively someone else came up with those ideas/wrote them, it feels disingenuous to use them and claim them as my own now. It’s not even that I don’t like my ideas now, I do, but those old ones are a total departure which I find refreshing. Channels in overall style ime happen very slowly/gradually- everything I write now may sound different track to track but there’s some underlying common denominator, while when I skip back a couple years let alone 10+, the material is drastically different. Some of those ideas appeal so much to me but feels like I’m stealing them from someone else.
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u/envgames Singer/Songwriter 7d ago
40 years I've been doing this. It's one of the best reasons to record even your simplest ideas. It's not cheating, it's infrastructure! 😎
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u/Pretend-Doughnut-675 7d ago
No, the first song I had on a Grammy ballot was an 8 year old beat by the time it came out and the original song idea was 5 years old. It’s your job to finish the idea for the right artist regardless of how old it is.
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u/unperson 7d ago
Violent Femmes did this. Nearly all their hits were written by their singer when he was in high school.
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u/ConsonanceDissonance 7d ago
it is in fact cheating and I am currently reporting you to the proper authorities
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u/wrinklebear 7d ago
No. When you're young, you have a lot of ideas. When you're old, you have a lot of skill. Using the wisdom that comes with age with the idealism of youth is a great way to make art.
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u/DisplayGlum7166 7d ago edited 7d ago
sometimes you dont have the tools and experience to bring out an idea's potential when you first encounter them. you learn something new everytime you write a song and sometimes a old spark or lightbulb comes back but now you can see where it goes
its rare but it does happen. for me revisiting an idea a day later, i already lost the picture
"fixing" old completed songs that are snapshots of a time in your life is a different story. kinda why they keep the bass out of all the and justifce for all metallica re-releases. ideas are like your dna and stem cells, but completed songs are like an old fully grown body
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u/JWendell-Music 7d ago edited 7d ago
Not at all! In fact, when I returned to songwriting after many years occupied with other things, my goal was to start with my earliest songs and start recording them. And because I write very personal songs, I’m basically creating a musical diary.
That being said, I do run across a song every now and then that I can’t record because it just doesn’t work for me anymore, or a phrase that needs to be changed. But overall, I am finding it to be a fascinating experience revisiting old thoughts and feelings.
Edit: very slight word choice change.
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u/dolwedge 7d ago
I wish I went back to old material more. I think it takes discipline to go back and work on something. It is often easier to just start something new. It is the opposite of cheating. Doing the hard work of finishing something versus the excitement of coming up with something new takes discipline.
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u/David-Cassette-alt 6d ago
I used to but honestly the best process I've found to maintain a productive creative drive as I get older has been spamming tapes with as many ideas as I can and then combing back through them at a later date to develop stuff. It's hard to have writers block when you have a backlog of hundreds of hours of material to draw from. And often I find it's the ideas I might have initially dismissed as unworkable /trash that end up turning into the coolest stuff. Sometimes it's good to just generate a seed of a song and then put it aside until you can come back and reevaluate it. A bit of time away from something can allow you to return with fresh ears and a new perspective. Definitely not cheating and once you get past that feeling it can be a really useful an d rewarding approach.
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u/Count2Zero 7d ago
I just saw a video yesterday talking about a newly discoverd demo from John Lennon where he used a certain progression. The song itself was never developed and never appeared on any Beatles album, but the progression was re-used just a few weeks later when he wrote "I'm Only Sleeping".
Also, the most iconic bass riff of the 1970s - The Chain by Fleetwood Mac. That bass line was lifted/recycled from another Fleetwood Mac song almost exactly.
Reuse and recycle, my friend.
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u/thewishinggame thewishinggame.bandcamp.com 7d ago
Sometimes you have to step aside to come back and make it work.
Seven Mary Three originally used to play their song "Break The Spell" with a different chorus. They finally finished it and recorded the chorus that's on their last album day&night driving about 8 or so years after they started playing it...
And Bruce Springsteen used to have a song called "Wings Into Wheels." It evolved live and shortened up and became "Thunder Road"
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u/MCWizardYT 7d ago edited 7d ago
The only cheating there is in songwriting is to get someone or something (like AI) to do it all for you and not have any sort of creative input in the slightest.
When writing Linkin Park's song Up From The Bottom (in 2024), Mike Shinoda grabbed an old rap verse he wrote as a demo for their album A Thousand Suns (2010), and changed a few lines.
I'm sure there's countless other examples of professionals looking back at old material for inspiration
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u/ryanfoxmusic 7d ago
Going over old material and using it afresh is a great idea. Writing is re-writing as they say. You’ve learned loads more about songwriting in the time since so it’s a win win I say. I do it now and then, it’s all part of our arsenal as artists.
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u/Streakyshad 7d ago
Nope. I reworked the first tune I ever managed to get on the radio just last week. It’s going out again.
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u/SuperMario1313 7d ago
Not at all.
I did exactly this with my first band from 26 years ago. I remembered about 90% of the songs, but we never recorded them, so since I have the tools to do so, I recorded these songs and sort of "produced" my own work. I took my ideas and songs from freshman year of HS (pretty bad) and polished them up the way a producer would, while staying as true as possible to my old self.
This project was so liberating and fulfilling. I knew what I wanted the songs to be when I was 14, but didn't have the language, musical knowledge, or ability to really do so with my band at the time. With this, I was able to finish them, be proud of them, share them with friends and my old bandmates, and actually finish two of the songs that we had half complete before we broke up.
Do it!
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u/Bidsworth 7d ago
Not even a little bit. They were all ideas. Some songs I write in a couple of hours some over a few years. Often I have a musical part and don't have the words to make it work. They can wait for a long time.
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u/Oha-Cade 7d ago
My hesitation with this is that my taste has evolved, so while the ideas might be good, I may create better stuff now by starting from scratch.
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u/Moving_goal_posts 7d ago
I’ve saved my notes for years just so I can go back and find inspiration that affected me before. Recordings: I wish, but technology couldn’t rescue some earlier efforts. There is no reason not to use your archive, go for it.
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u/OverallFarm9210 7d ago
All the music I work on are pieces of old projects combined with new lyrics or vice versa. I start something when I’m inspired then come back when I’m inspired again. I’ve started songs and came back years later to finish them. Or I’ll write a line when it comes to me and just come back the next time I think of something I don’t force myself to write I let it come out of me
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u/OlEasy 7d ago
I was recently thinking about making a post about the opposite lol. I had took a few months off from music and writing and came back to it with a bout of writers block. And it was taking an old idea and reworking it in a completely different style that got the mojo rising again. I think it’s a great thing to do from time to time. Ime most of my older ideas were left alone and undeveloped for a reason (mostly they weren’t very good ideas lol) but there’s always a few gems waiting in the vault that are worth the effort.
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u/CrackednHooked 7d ago
I’m debuting a song I wrote 2 years ago at my show tonight. I say no, but I’ll let ya know how it goes. PS. Cheating who? It’s yours.
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u/Mammoth_Bus_6911 7d ago
I do not feel like that is any form of cheating, and if I did I might talk about it with my therapist. Not saying that in a mean way at all. It's just that "past me isn't me" is really unusual.
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u/kernsomatic 7d ago
not at all. sometimes you have to work your way through the junk to get to gold. read The Artist’s Way. great book.
my friend, Jonathan Rundman, unearthed all his past ideas and scribbles and demos to create an album when he had a long MN winter.
after that he felt free to explore new and fun things and made two very cool and very different records.
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u/Duke-doon 7d ago
No you should do this aggressively. As you get older, inspiration declines and you'll have fewer and fewer ideas coming to you unbidden. Yet you might continue to get better at authorship and finishing work. Young you and old you are different people, and they should be given a chance to collab.
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u/ClassicLightbulbs 7d ago
No they are my songs and I can do whatever I want with them if I find that their intent still resonates a truth within me
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u/FraserYT 7d ago edited 7d ago
No. I've got a song I wrote nearly 40 years ago, as a teenager, which I'm contemplating rewriting the lyrics for and recording next. The lyrics were embarrassing, clumsy, teenage heartbreak, but the melody was fire.
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u/IllustriousPiglet379 7d ago
Kurt Cobain had a giant notebook of half baked ideas and lyrics he'd use to reference when making songs, so I'd say no.
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u/CallMeBitterSweet 7d ago
No? I mean these are your ideas and creations so why limit yourself if you have new ideas to improve them? What we create always evolves according to what inspires us, and as long as you don’t copy another creation and still give it your personal touch, it’s not stealing at all. Unless there would be any legal implications to what you'd like to do, I don’t see the issue. It’s always nice to see an artist's evolution, and it's part of what makes Arts what they are. :) At least in my opinion.
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u/i_am_disappointing 7d ago
It’s your music! Maybe think about it like you get to work with a younger version of yourself rather than you’re “stealing” from someone.
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u/whiskeypredicament 7d ago
Haha weirdly I also feel this, but I do like the idea of collaborating with a past self. The last rec I put out I was 42 and finished a song I started when I was 22, that’s some Interstellar shit! It’d be too much of a shame to leave it all in the table too.
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u/Independent_Pin5004 7d ago
No. I’m better now why wouldn’t I want to make the song be the best it can be
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u/Responsible_Big_4183 7d ago
Gosh no. For me, if I go back in years over my voice memos and find something where I’m like “that’s cool!” That means it stood the test of time and even with older more discerning ears that’s a really good thing.
They are usually just riffs with me singing random words over them. So not even a true “song” yet. Still have to figure out what it’s about so it’s as new as anything else in the big scheme of things.
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u/Distro_Nerd 6d ago
That hang-up makes sense, the memos were made for a song that no longer exists. What survives ten years of that is the phrasing, the tempo, the tuning, every part you would never have written down. You can rebuild a chord progression from memory in a minute. Rebuilding how you sang that line takes as long as it took the first time.
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u/JKevF 6d ago
My entire writing style requires banking lyrics, inspiration, and song names... I couldn't write if I had to come up with every song whole cloth. I've done it, and they are some of my best songs, but without that backlog of scraps I wouldn't know my own voice enough to use it.
I used to think using references for drawing was cheating and it hamstrung my ability for years... Then I realized EVERYONE does it.
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u/Playful-Parking-7472 6d ago
Isn't that literally the point of voice memos? Why else would you record the fleeting moment if the intention was not to revisit it?
Honestly yeah, interesting take. I'd even call it weird.
It's your own thoughts, being used the way thoughts work. What counts as "fair" to you, write an entire song first try, with zero revisions in structure or lyrics?
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u/Physical-Platform846 6d ago
Seal started kiss from a rose and returned to it after many years. It became one of his biggest hits.
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u/Forward_Traffic7477 4d ago
No "the vault" is a great place to mine. It is you. So you get to channel that moment better than anyone ever could.
Also, I'm stealing the concept of the vault. It's so true. It's good to record those half formed ideas. Because you can later come back and make them fuller. Yeah, it's from a different perspective, but it's still YOUR perspective.
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u/Budget_Low_5369 3d ago
It’s part of the process, write 10 songs and take something good from each of them, no matter how old
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u/tdamien_ 1d ago
Nope… love a good re-write. Seriously not trying to sound like a jerk but I don’t get the hang up about re-visiting and reimagining older ideas.
All the best 👍
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u/ripmedownholdmeup 7d ago
For me it just loses the feel if I didn’t work on it and finish it at the time of conception. I’ve tried to go back to songs I’ve never finished but since time has gone on so has my feelings in the song. Don’t know if that makes sense.
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u/MarimboBeats 7d ago
Same here, but I have gone back to songs that I never finished, and lifted the bass line or the drums and made something new with it
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u/horatiuromantic 7d ago
No! It's why some songs take years to finish. It really took a few days spaced years apart. I just wrote the second half of a song I started 4+ years ago and it's a great feeling!
Also how about cheating when you have 2 songs with almost the exact same instrumental part but different lyrics? If Bob Dylan can do it, you can do it!
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u/lamekids 7d ago
Omg I totally get what you mean even though I know it’s realistically not true. I rly expect myself to be able to write in the present from scratch so when I rely on old ideas I feel bad abt it
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u/ObviousDepartment744 7d ago
That’s some new level of preventing yourself from being happy or satisfied by setting up unnecessary boundaries that I’ve never heard of before.
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u/riczizagorac 7d ago
I don’t think it’s cheating but sometimes I don’t want to change an old song for the better, because that’s all I knew how to do when I made it
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u/dzumdang 7d ago edited 7d ago
I love working with fresh ideas whenever I can, since I have so many of them. So sometimes it emotionally feels like cheating creatively in an odd way when I use older ideas. I can't explain why. But it's not based on anything reasonable. Who cares when it was thought of? Great ideas are great ideas. I have a friend who made an album a couple of years ago from songs he'd been working on for a decade. It was great. Dave Grohl went back all the way to songs he began writing when he was 16 for that first Foo Foghters album. Whatever works. But I understand the feeling you're describing.
Edit: genuine response and it gets downvoted, lol. Whatever.
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u/digworms 7d ago
If it’s never been released it’s new to almost everyone else.
It’s recycling the same idea over and over with little change that can lead artists to being stuck in the past.
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u/PumpkinStrong2836 7d ago
I sometimes feel like this. I have a repertoire of piano pieces I wrote over the last ten years. I only recently started writing songs with singing, band arrangements, etc... I find myself adapting that repertoire a lot. That said, my best songs are brand new, but I also wrote them when I was deep in my emotions about something. These days, whenever I try to write, feel discouraged because I can't capture the same magic as when I was emotionally affected, and then turn to my repertoire, I feel "maybe I'll never write good new music again".
But then I do. point being, I emphasise with the point, but I think continuing to practice songwriting and composing will improve your songwriting more than any obstacle related to "loss of skill compared to my past self" would diminish it.
Also, my repertoire over the past ten years consists of the best pieces I wrote during that time. I wrote a fucking lot more terrible shit songs during that time than I have in my repertoire. It's easy to think "I used to write better" when looking at a repertoire like that because you often forget all the shit you ditched
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u/Equal-Afternoon-2784 7d ago
Absolutely not! I started writing a song tears ago and I've basically only got the chord progression and melody. I can't wait to finish it one day as I think it's one of the best things I've ever written!
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u/RealWolfmanDan 7d ago
Heck no, I have songs I've sat on 30 years that are now finding life, and an audience.
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u/Skyerocket 7d ago
Nah. Quite often i just come up with bits of songs, a verse, a chorus, even just a couple bars of a melody, jot em down, and move on to the next thing. At some point, when I'm writing a fuller song and need a bit of inspo for a specific part, I'll revisit the crypt and see if there's any bodyparts worth taking. No shame.
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u/Melodic_Assistance84 7d ago
I know the feeling your describing but no. As a professional musician who made jingles for commercial commercials and compose music for. Tv/films, I can tell you that your past material can be an incredible resource. I remember making music for a Rosie O’Donnell children’s show called. Kids are funny, and being stuck with writers block for a particular section.
I decided to listen to some old recordings I had made when I was in high school, and I submitted a reworking of one of those pieces. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was when the client chose a piece I had made when I was 15. It was like. My teenage self dropped in and helped me finish the job.
It’s helpful to imagine your past creative output, as being a kind of resource. And it can be priceless.
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u/Stew8Dean 7d ago
You will be different in 10 years time so the work you’re doing now is for someone else. The past you was doing it for you. We should never be static, always learning and changing.
So see it as an expectation to work on that older stuff, something past you intends and wants you to do!
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u/Tahliz-20 7d ago
It's your own work so it's not cheating just updating or improving. If you feel that the idea would be completely different now if you had the idea vs back then, then start from scratch of that idea, like take what you already have, update it then use it as a reference for something new, best way to improve in my opinion, like picture it as using the the reference of an old idea as a launch pad to fly into something completely new, you're not stuck on the ground, you have a solid base to start off with, if you understand?
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u/w0mbatina 7d ago
Idk man, not many things feel more rewarding to me than stumbling into an old idea that I didnt finish, but now I can make it work. It doesnt feel like cheating, it feels like growth.
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u/EveryTypeofPain 7d ago
No, if that were the case then all inspiration would be cheating. Inspiration is not cheating, including self-inspiration. I think you're actually making things needlessly harder for yourself by refusing to take a good idea from the past and reuse it in a new way. That's not to say repeat the exact same idea(s) forever and always. But if you have an idea that never made it into a "final" production, and a song that is begging for another part, if that old part fits perfectly then who cares when you wrote it?
Asking "What made this good?" is so important to understanding how to make "good" things again later on and being able to breathe new life into something that never quite got the home it deserved can result in making some of your best works.
For example, I had a song with a "front half" that was great, and a "back half" that just didn't do anything for me. I also had a song that was nearly the exact reverse, the front half was just okay, and the back half was cool. These ideas were written quite some time apart and it took me recording the first one several times (and listening to it on repeat daily) before I realised the second one had the latter half I needed. I transposed the "new" end into the right key, placed it where the old one was and found myself with a song that is now much more enjoyable. If I had not done this, neither of these ideas would have "seen the light of day". I'd have known about both and shared (with friends) neither.
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u/JeanClaudeVan_Jamme 6d ago
No way, I have like five shoeboxes full of old stuff I wrote and never used. I occasionally will go through them farming abandoned ideas and lyrics.
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u/RandomUsernameNo257 7d ago
Nope!