I was looking today at a song I wrote a few years ago, just to check the words - and it struck me how what I remembered now differed from what I wrote then.

For example I had two lines:

It was on a Monday morning, and so cold and dark and wet,
And the face there in the mirror seemed to somehow look upset

But how I remembered it, and would sing it now would be

It was on a Monday morning, and so cold and dark and grey,
And the face there in the mirror seemed to somehow look dismayed

And I could go through the rest of it, and the same kind of changes had crept in. I won't, because I'm not trying to start a thread about a particular song, but about the process of change. Changes for the better, questionable changes and changes for the worse.

If you check the lyrics on records against the lyrics in record notes it's pretty obvious that this happens to lots of people who write songs, probably most, I'd say. And I'd think that generally songs improve this way, with a process of unconscious as well as conscious rewriting.

The same thing happens with other people's songs, and with traditional songs, with words being misheard or forgotten, and often replaced. And I'm wondering, where do the scales stand between changes that improve songs and changes that damage them?

My instinct is that on balance songs improve through this process, not just traditional songs, songs in general. But I suspect some people wouldn't see it that way.