"The Whole World"

In which I try to scrape the “ick” off an otherwise promising song I’d abandoned ten years ago.

Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.

Today’s installment finds me in a Detroit motel on a day off, and I’ve been inspired by a tweet sent out by my friend John Moe. His observation was simple and true and went sorta viral.

It spurred a memory of a song I wrote a decade ago called “The Whole World,” which found the narrator marveling at this very idea. Of course, true to form, I made the song’s narrator a sad, creepy stalker-type character.

WHY DO I DO THAT?!?

Why did this song never find a home? Oh, I have a pretty good idea why…

Is it the quadruple usage of the words “Waffle House?” Maybe.

Is it the use of the super-funny word “internets” (which, honestly, just reading that word makes me sad)? Maybe. Because dad jokes are the wrong kind of sad. But that’s not really a song-killer—just a meh lyric.

The “boys have always wanted to make sweet, sweet love with girls who do not know that they exist” line is just a lot. Even if I was to change it from “to girls” to “with girls” it wouldn’t do much to soften the ick factor. That line is a real problem.

But the dingdingding winner is the creepy narrator! The guy who’s stalking some poor girl in the choruses? What was I even thinking? To be fair, this was about a year before I chose sobriety, so I definitely wasn’t thinking as clearly as I could have back then.

Now, ten years later, as I gear up to become an actual PROFESSOR of songwriting, I’m even more interested in what makes some songs “successful” (by which I mean artistically rather than commercially), and I’m about to spend a whole semester proselytizing to students about the glory of revision. I believe it’s true that a piece almost never comes out perfect immediately—it usually takes many passes, failures and false starts before a song works.

So I challenged myself today to repair “The Whole World.” (Boy, that sounds like a mighty undertaking.)

Truth be told, I almost sent out a version of this missive with a performance of the problematic original version as the ONLY version, but I chose instead to let this be a teaching moment for myself as much as y’all. I spent some time on the rewrite. I don’t think it’s all the way there yet, but it’s definitely less, um, creepy?

Here’s the updated “The Whole World.”

I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts on how it turned out.

yrs,

Rhett