Is a Melody You Had to Force Worth More?

There are a lot of people in music today forcing themselves to find a melody. I don’t often see the forcing pay off.

To me, melodies that arrive suddenly and without much effort feel more original. I think they’re also the ones that find the most success. But I need to be careful here, because I have no measurement; I only have an impression.

Then there are melodies dragged out over years. Maybe emerging after all that labour means they deserve more. Or maybe the opposite: when all the energy goes into getting a melody born, there’s none left to get it heard.

Here’s my own case. I wrote the chorus of “Baş Tacı” in a day. The rest took years. I didn’t sit there holding a guitar and paper the whole time, of course, but when something drags on, the excitement doesn’t stay put either. There’s a demo vocal I owe Kerem, and for weeks now I haven’t managed to sit down and record it. While a song I worked on for years, words and music, waits for the arrangement it deserves, the energy to put a demo vocal on top of it doesn’t disappear, but it loses its intensity.

Still, I’ll most likely have recorded it and sent it before Kerem ever reads these lines.

If I’m honest with myself: for a song that took years to appear, a year of arrangement might even be short. The impatient one here might be me.

The question that’s left is one I can’t answer. Is there any measure of what deserves what? Is effort a unit that measures the return, or just something we count as valuable because we know it was spent? I haven’t found a way to tell the two apart.