Some songs are complete at first draft, some songscraps (especially, for me, in the past) and nothing more, and some go through several drafts and/or versions. Artists have been known to revisit earlier takes as the mood takes them.

There are a couple more thoughts I had on our last effort so let’s look at that False Alarm again:

False Alarm 

The sirens resemble the things we love best
assayed and assiduous as we can attest
Deploy the lever on the Great Deceiver
had it up to here with fate believers

This wasn’t even the original edit which I did up top. The principle though, of letting that last line scan more, was there.

Truthfully, if audience and listener have not been introduced to another line you could make it ‘had it up to here with late believers’ and they would extract a meaning from that, or at least find it doesn’t jar their experience of listening to the song.

I’m using the They equivalent of the Royal We here as many musicians are listeners and writers are readers and I’m happy to be in that throng. I can’t speculate whether other lyricists and songwriters are more precious about retaining their first meaning or slant but, as long as I’ve kept a copy of earlier drafts, I’m quite ready to ditch an idea or switch perception.

You know, I couldn’t recall that earlier idea for line four but I do believe it was ‘had it up to here with fake believers’. I wasn’t thinking of the rhyme with Great Deceiver but the variations of ‘false’ which is why I didn’t glom when writing ‘fate‘ if not tempting it.

II

On another tangent, the original conception of the sirens can be realised as

False Alarm 

The sirens are sorry they sought your assistance
lighting the path to least resistance