The song Phil Collins almost deleted from history: “Should I rewrite?”
Phil Collins was writing music long before he was a member of Genesis; it’s in his DNA.
Yes, he always intended to be in a band and play live, but before any of that happened, he was in his room, penning tracks about heartbreak and imagining them being sung by crowds of people. Not many of these songs ever saw the light of day, but they set the foundation for Collins to become a definitive figure within the world of music.
There’s a lot more to Collins than just his ability to write songs, though. He’s a musician who understands the importance of the song as a whole, because he wasn’t a selfish artist; he took a step back, looked at the whole painting rather than just his brush strokes… so to speak.
This is an ability he developed when he started working with Genesis, and while he had been writing songs for a while, when he joined Genesis, he was working with a range of musicians who already had experience making music together, which is why he didn’t want to suddenly impose his ideas on those musicians, and instead, he helped them work out how the songs they were making should come together.
“The spirit of Genesis was Tony, Mike and Peter,” said Collins. “I didn’t regard myself as a songwriter then. But there were things in Genesis I was highly influential in. My strength was arranging […] I was very into the first line-up of Yes – the one with [guitarist] Peter Banks. I remember listening to them and loving the way they took other people’s songs […] And did something different with them.”
Collins perfected the art of arranging to the extent that when he felt confident enough to start putting forward his own songs, they ended up being some of the band’s very best. And of course, his songwriting ability wasn’t confined to the parameters of a group, as Collins also had a great deal of success playing as a solo artist. You could argue his solo career was much more successful than anything he made with others.
There was such an appetite for the music that Collins made as a solo act that decades after the records had been released, he opted to re-release them as special editions. Of course, with decades passing since the songs originally being written and the date of rerelease, the world around Collins had changed, and his attitude to some of his songs was also different. It led to him being tempted to remove some of the songs from the album when he felt like they didn’t work on the whole.
This was particularly an issue for the album Both Sides, as looking back at the LP, Collins realised there was one song that stood out amongst the rest. As such, he was tempted to get rid of the track altogether to make things more cohesive, but he eventually managed to talk himself out of it.
“There was one track where I was wondering whether it should’ve gone on: ‘We Wait And We Wonder’. The rest of the material was very personal. ‘We Wait And We Wonder’ was more of my thoughts on the situation in Northern Ireland,” explained Collins.
Concluding, “So I thought, ‘Should I take that song off? I’ve got an opportunity now to do that’. But then you start thinking about things like, ‘Well, should I rewrite the lyrics to something? ’Cause I can sing that better.’ And then you start digging a big hole for yourself.”
