Some songs arrive dressed. This one arrived feral. We tried it as a piano ballad and it sulked. We tried it with the full band and it shouted over itself.
Back to the first voice memo
In the end my producer played me the original memo — me, half asleep, one guitar, a kettle boiling somewhere in the background. That was the record. We rebuilt everything around that kettle-hiss intimacy and it finally sat still.
A demo isn’t a rough draft of the song. Sometimes it is the song, embarrassed by its new clothes.