by Serguey Shinder
Our band wrote about forty songs between 2011 and 2017, and in all that time we never once discussed who had written them. It would have felt like accountancy. A song usually started with a riff our guitarist brought in or a verse I had on my phone, and then four of us spent weeks in a rehearsal room turning it into the thing people actually heard. The idea that one of us owned it more than the others would have seemed faintly insulting.
In 2019, two years after we stopped playing, one of those songs was licensed for a television advert. Not a large one. It was still, by a comfortable distance, the most money any of our music ever made.
The registration with the collecting society, which our guitarist had done in 2013 because somebody had to, listed him and me as the writers, half each. That was how he remembered it, and to be fair to him the chords and the lyric were ours. Our drummer remembered the song as having been nothing much until he changed the feel in the second week. Our bassist remembered, correctly, that the part everybody hummed was a line he had found in the room. All of those things are true. I was there.
Nobody was lying. We were four people remembering something from six years earlier, each clearly remembering the part they had played, and nobody had written anything down at the time because at the time we agreed. That was the part I had missed. We never needed to write it down, because the night a song is finished is the one moment in its life when everybody involved is delighted with everybody else.
It took most of a year, a mediator, and a split none of us thought was fair to settle it. Two of us have not really spoken since, which is the actual cost and has nothing to do with the money.
I play with different people now, and what we do is short. The night a song is finished, before anybody goes home, we write the split on a sheet of paper, everybody signs it, and somebody photographs it. It takes about four minutes. It is usually an even split and nobody argues, which is exactly why it has to happen then, before there is anything to argue about.
I have stopped thinking of that sheet as paperwork about the song. It is the last part of writing it. Until it exists, the song is waiting for the day it becomes worth something, and that is the worst possible day to discover what everybody remembers.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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