A World of First Drafts

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A World of First Drafts

June 14, 2026 (

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Five short essays on where we are currently at.

A World of First Drafts

Dreams and the Uncanny Valley

Fiddlers in the Room

The Last Hike

Semantic Satiation of an Acronym

A World of First Drafts

I recently picked up a copy of “An Evening With Windham Hill”, a collection of early 1980s live performances by some of Windham Hill’s popular-at-the-time acoustic guitar players. I primarily bought the LP for the recording of “Turning: Turning Back” by Alex deGrassi, as it was the only way to get this on vinyl; the 1992 retrospective that also contains the track was never (officially) released on anything but CD.

The album contains a more interesting track on it, that being the first (?) performance of a Michael Hedges composition. Introducing the performance Hedges says “This is a new piece for [that] started out for guitar and then, er, all of a sudden it needed piano and about a week ago it needed bass so… We need to play it tonight. It’s dedicated to Steve Reich, and it’s called Spare Change.”

The performance starts out very Hedges like, with his (now) distinct playing style and tapping on his instrument, but then after about forty seconds the piano comes in and Hedges influence seems to be diluted. He pulls it back but seems to be fighting with the piano, and when the bass solo arrives at three minutes Hedges is then completely lost to Manring. The three instruments then battle for the remaining two minutes of the composition leaving us at an ending that feels unresolved. So unresolved it takes the audience several seconds to realise the performance is over.

The composition and its performance was very much a first draft. Some interesting ideas in places, but ultimately lacking cohesion, unsatisfying, and even forgettable. Hedges’ voice (that of his guitar) is lost amongst the parts that aren’t his.

When Hedges released the final version two years later, on the album “Aerial Boundaries”, he knew the piece needed work so he made some major changes. The first was to drop the key two semitones lower. I guess he removed the capo from his guitar. The second change was more substantial: Hedges decided to replace the piano and bass parts with his own guitar, spending over one hundred hours recording sounds, looping them, playing them backwards, splicing tapes, pulling them apart and sticking them together, experimenting, all to get the textures that fit.

Over one hundred hours in the studio in 1983, and likely many hours after those first drafts in 1982, to create a five minute long piece of music. Hedges could have just released the original arrangement, but he knew it was mediocre so continued to refine it.

The version realised on “Aerial Boundaries”, and the liner notes explicitly use the verb realised rather than recorded, is probably the most striking work in Hedges’ entire discography.

Because there are other remarkable recordings on the album, especially the title track, and due to the near impossibility of performing the track live, “Spare Change” is often ignored. That doesn’t mean Hedges’ time and effort to refine it was a waste, as the track still stands out today. Along with the first live recording, the final version is a permanent record of an idea elevated to something interesting, influential, even epochal.

Fingerstyle guitar was going through some major changes in the early eighties, and Hedges was one of several important composers and performers at the time. Had he just sat back, been satisfied with the first draft, not torn it apart to rebuild, it would have been forgotten. I wouldn’t be writing about it today, and it’s possible it may have been discarded and failed to make the final cut for the album.

Perhaps the composition would have been dredged up some time in the future, when an artist’s career reaches that inevitable scraping of the barrel stage. Alas, Hedges was killed in an automobile accident in 1997, at the age of 43.

The obvious place I’m going with all this is that I increasingly feel like we are moving into a world of first drafts. One where ideas are formed but then delegated to something else to refine them. The problem with this approach is there is nothing new to pull from the tombola, you still have a first draft at the end of that process and haven’t gone anywhere compelling.

I’ve even had someone defend their approach with “the ideas are all mine”. But ideas are easy, execution and refinement are hard and that’s where your individuality comes through. Maybe your ideas are boring, and your arguments are weak? I’d still like to read them in your style. Writers have built entire careers on this.

The reason I read your blog, or listen to your music, or watch your videos, or look at your photos is because I’m interested in how you see and react to and interpret the world. If your voice and idiom is lost to the machine’s...