Wildfire, and the same lesson dressed better

Listen:

Note: this one isn't going to streaming; YouTube only!

Wildfire was my second song. After Avalanche, I'd half-noticed that the lyrics were thinner than they should have been, even if I couldn't yet say what was thin about them. So with Wildfire I tried to do better. I wrote a finding-your-voice empowerment song, with a girl who'd been silenced trying to find her voice (which is another early song I may write about - Find My Voice). The central metaphor was fire instead of avalanche. The opening line I was proudest of was "My voice was smoke, I dragged it down." There were many versions of this line that started with "my voice was smoke," but it was a late-night thought that turned it: smokers drag on a cigarette, smoke drags down. This is clever, let's go.

This time I added concrete details. "On the gray tile floor." "I raised my hand." "It cracked on the first word." "Three seconds of my truth out loud." I was specifically trying to put a person on the page, because I'd vaguely understood that Avalanche was missing one. I added the detail. I built the metaphor. I got a chorus that landed.

I worked on Wildfire for weeks. Different versions, different tempos, different production decisions. I generated many versions across multiple attempts in Suno. None of them quite worked, and at the time I couldn't understand why. Eventually I shelved it. It's never going to streaming. It exists on YouTube as a kind of in-progress fossil.

Looking at it now, I solved the wrong problem.

The diagnosis I'd half-arrived at on Avalanche was "not enough specific detail." So with Wildfire I added specific detail. The detail is real. Gray tile floor is a good line. Cracked on the first word is a good line. But look where they sit in the song. They arrive in the bridge and the pre-bridge catalyst, in the last quarter. Everything before that is fire imagery describing feelings, not scenes showing a person.

Read the chorus:

I am the wildfire - I burned through the floor I am the wildfire - I spoke and they heard I turned to flame, I owned my name The silence is burning, I am the wildfire

What did she say when she spoke? She spoke, they heard, she owned her name. The chorus is a celebration with the actual event removed. "They" - the people who silenced her - never get a face or a behaviour. They want her silent. They tell her to stay small. That's all we get. They could be anyone, which means in the song they're no one.

The Avalanche problem was that the metaphor was so dominant the people disappeared into it. The Wildfire problem turned out to be subtler. I'd added concrete details, but the metaphor was still the structural skeleton. Every chorus, every pre-chorus, every verse was about fire. The specific details became decoration around a song that was, at the spine, about fire shouting about itself.

There's one moment where the song shows me the problem itself. The outro:

The girl on the gray tile floor is gone. I became the wildfire.

The song names the person it's been about - the girl on the gray tile floor - exactly once, at the very end, and the line is announcing that she's gone. The person disappears at the moment she becomes the metaphor. The song enacts what's wrong with it. I did not notice this at the time. It's the most useful thing in the whole track now.

Adding specific details, it turns out, is not the same as making structural room for a person. If the metaphor is doing all the spine work, the details just sit around it. The song will run the metaphor over the human and you won't see it happening because each line will pass its own internal test.

I don't know where the line is yet between metaphor as scaffolding and metaphor as replacement. Wildfire showed me the line exists. Karaoke Jesus and Visiting Hours - both written later - try to find different positions on it, with different success rates I'll write about elsewhere. For now, Wildfire stays unfinished. The Suno take on YouTube is as far as it's going.