by Serguey Shinder
There was a passage in a song I wrote that I was privately in love with. A little instrumental turn in the middle, intricate and satisfying to play, the kind of thing that made me feel like I actually knew what I was doing. Everyone I played the song for was polite about it and quiet about the rest, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what their politeness was telling me.
The passage was the best thing in the song and the worst thing for it. It was too good, in the wrong way. It pulled the whole piece to a stop so it could show off, and the moment it ended, everyone remembered they had been listening to a song, not a demonstration. I had built the entire thing around a part that served me and not the music, and I had loved it precisely because it flattered me.
Cutting it was genuinely painful. I tried everything to keep it. I moved it, shortened it, buried it lower in the mix, bargained with myself in every way a person bargains to keep the thing they are proud of. And each rescue attempt made the song a little worse, because the problem was never where the passage sat. The problem was that it existed at all, in that song, doing what it did.
When I finally took it out, the song exhaled. It went somewhere. The verses connected to the chorus without a monument standing between them, and the thing became, for the first time, actually good, in a plain and unshowy way that gave me none of the private thrill the passage had. That was the hardest part. The song got better and I felt worse, because I had lost the moment that made me feel talented.
That taught me to be suspicious of the parts of my own work I am proudest of, especially when the pride is about me rather than the work. The passage was not serving the song. It was serving my image of myself as someone who could write passages like that, and those are very different masters. The things we most want to keep are often the things we kept for ourselves.
I have carried this everywhere. The clever bit of code, the paragraph I love the sound of, the feature that shows how much I know, all of it gets the same hard question now. Is this here because the thing needs it, or because I need it to be seen. When the honest answer is the second, it has to go, however much it hurts.
The kindest thing I can do for anything I make is to be willing to cut the part I am proudest of, when that part has quietly stopped being about the work.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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