Singing every word wrong

There's a line in "Turn It All the Way Up" that I'm fond of: "Someone's singin' every word wrong, but it feels so right when we sing along."

I put it in because it's true of every good night I've had in a crowd. Nobody knows all the words. Half the room is guessing and the other half is louder than they are right, and it still works. It works better, really.

That's something I try to hold on to when I write. A song for a crowd isn't a performance for the crowd. It's something they get to be inside of. If the words are easy to catch and the chorus is easy to grab, people will fill in the rest themselves, wrong or right.

I used to worry about whether every lyric was perfect. Now I worry about whether somebody in the back, a little loud and not quite sure of the second verse, can still find the chorus and sing it with everybody else.

If they can, it's a good song. The rest is detail.

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