I have spent the last several weeks shortening songs.
The number that keeps coming back is three minutes and thirty seconds. If I want the work to be heard seriously, that is the practical ceiling I have been given.
So I have been making radio edits.
What surprises me is that I rarely think the shorter version is better.
Cleaner, maybe. Tighter, certainly. More likely to get through the door, probably. But better? Usually not.
That leaves me with a bargain I understand even if I do not entirely like it.
I want the songs heard. To make that possible, I am willing to reshape them for the conditions in which people are willing to listen.
Sometimes the constraint helps. A verse that can disappear probably was not doing enough. A bridge that can lose twenty seconds without changing the song may have been explaining something twice.
Discipline is not the enemy.
But the harder question is what happens next.
So far, I have been looking backward, taking songs that already exist and fitting them into a smaller container. That work has consumed time I might otherwise have spent writing something new.
Going forward, the container will already be there.
I will know the limit before the first line is written.
That is different.
A constraint applied afterward can sharpen a song. A constraint present from the beginning can shape what I imagine is possible.
Maybe that will make me better. Maybe I will enter later, leave earlier, trust the listener more, and stop protecting lines simply because I remember how hard they were to write.
But I also wonder what disappears when the clock enters the room too soon.
I do not know yet.
For now, I am making the bargain because I want the door to open.
I just want to notice what I am paying to walk through it.