I'm So Over this Song

Last week I wrote about Billy Joel and a song that hasn’t been performed in years. It must be tough for a songwriter to have to perform songs over and over for years. Glen Frey famously said that the Eagles first breakup was because he didn’t want to play “Take it Easy” when he got old. David Bowie didn’t want to play his early 80s songs after the Glass Spider Tour. Elvis Presley in the 1970s didn’t want to replay his 1950s songs. He would race through them or do a medley, where he played the first verse and the chorus and then go onto another song. 

Imagine if you had to play a song that you wrote for a lover. A song for an event. Years later you don’t feel the same and yet you have to play that song as you did when you were in love. Fans that pay $100 for a ticket, parking, and ticket fees demand that song. It must drag on a singer. 

On the brilliant podcast Bruce Springsteen Sings the Alphabet, Rob Carmichael pondered this also. 

It isn’t just singers. Ian Fleming killed James Bond in a book (no,spoiler, not telling you which one). Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes in a story. Fans demanded those characters be brought back. Each author had to back and bring those characters back and write several more stories. 

Dream Dancing has been out for years. It’s a story with sex, strippers, and murder. I still sell it at book fairs. Am I in that place when I wrote the story? No. I can’t imagine the wife would be happy if I did research on that topic again. So I don’t know if I could write that story again. What if you wanted me to? The customer is always right.

In summation, I don’t know how an artist feels when they want to grow and the fans don’t want that. I can imagine that it takes the inspiration out of you from the few examples that I gave.