Avalanche, listened to honestly

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This was one of the first proper songs I made. Power ballad, big chorus, female vocal, the works. Suno did beautiful work with it - when I first heard it back I genuinely couldn't believe I'd had a hand in something that sounded like that. The piano in the intro, the way the drums come in for the second chorus, the slight grain on the vocal in the bridge. It still sounds lovely to me, honestly. I play it occasionally and it holds up as a listen.

But I've written a fair few songs since, and read a lot, and broken down a lot of hits. And going back to Avalanche now, I can see clearly what I couldn't see at the time: the production is doing nearly all the work. The lyrics are doing very little.

I want to write about why, because Avalanche is the cleanest example I've got of the trap I think a lot of AI-assisted songwriters fall into - including, very obviously, me.

What I was trying to do

I was working from Wrecking Ball as the template. Power ballad, central destructive metaphor, building intensity from piano to full drums, an unstoppable-force chorus that lands the title every time. I matched the syllable counts. I held the metaphor consistent across every section - falling snow in the verse, the avalanche itself in the chorus, the cold and the white in the bridge. By the time I had the lyric sheet I was pleased with myself. The structure was tight and the metaphor never broke.

I thought structural tightness was the thing.

What the lyrics actually do

Read the verse again, cold:

We met, we sparked, one flake of white We danced beneath the falling snow We touched, I fell into the cold Before the storm began to grow

Now ask: what happened to this person? Where did they meet? What's he like? What did he do that made her feel buried? You can't answer any of it from the lyric. The verse is entirely inside the metaphor. There's no him, there's no relationship, there's no scene. Just snow.

It scans. It rhymes. It tracks the metaphor faithfully. It's also wallpaper.

The chorus has the same problem in a louder form:

You came down like an avalanche You crushed but never loved me half as much All I wanted was to see the sun All you ever did was bury me

"Crushed but never loved me half as much" - half as much as what? The line wants to be devastating but the comparison is incomplete; there's no second half for the half to refer to. "All I wanted was to see the sun" could appear under a sunrise photo on Instagram. "All you ever did was bury me" is the strongest line of the four and it's still a line that could appear in dozens of songs about dozens of relationships.

Compare any of this to a Wrecking Ball lyric. Miley actually has "I never meant to start a war / I just wanted you to let me in," which is specific in a way the avalanche lyrics never get to - it tells you what she wanted, what went wrong, what the fight is about. Avalanche never tells you any of that. It just keeps describing snow.

Where it gets interesting

The bridge is where I think the song almost wakes up:

I should've run when the first flake fell I should have known you'd pull me down But I just stood there in the cold Now I'm the one who can't breathe out

This is the only moment in the song where the narrator admits any complicity. I should've run. I just stood there. That's a flicker of the contradiction that great pop ballads run on - the narrator who's both the victim and the person who walked into it. If the rest of the song had been operating at this level of honesty, Avalanche would be a different song.

But the bridge is one isolated moment. It doesn't change the verses, doesn't change the chorus, doesn't get followed up. The line "But I broke free from your slide" arrives near the end and undoes even the bridge's small admission - suddenly she's empowered and walking away, no transition, no earned shift, just a tacked-on resolution. It's the song trying to wrap itself up neatly when the more interesting version would have ended unresolved.

What it taught me

The lesson isn't that Avalanche is a bad song. People who hear it like it. Suno's work on it is genuinely lovely. The lesson is that production can do an enormous amount of emotional work, and a song can sound elite while the lyric is doing almost nothing - and if you're not careful, the production will fool you about the lyric. It fooled me. I rated Avalanche 98 out of 100 in my own head when I finished it. Every song I've written since has been an argument with that confidence.

What the elite power ballads do that Avalanche doesn't: they put a real person on the page. All Too Well gives you the scarf, the sister's house, the dancing in the kitchen. Someone Like You gives you turning up uninvited, the friend who told her, don't forget me, I beg. You can picture them. They couldn't be about anyone but the specific person they're about. Avalanche could be about anyone. That's the gap.

I'm leaving the song up as it is. Not rewriting it. The audio is what it is, the lyric is what it is, and the post you're reading wouldn't exist if the song had been better. It's the most useful thing I've written, in that sense.

If you've listened to it: thanks. I still think it sounds lovely. I just know now what it isn't doing.