// Letters to YVYNYL //

The News - Fail Better

 / Poetry has always played an important part of coming to terms with the idea of failure in music songwriting. Philadelphia-based duo Rachel Haines and Benjamin James do some meditation on this, and wanted to send me their thoughts on their first ever single release. Balancing the poser of words, the places they fall in between the cracks, the way they crawl into your skin without  you understanding their impact until years later; this is what good songwriting is all about. 

hello mark

we are going to attempt to write about “fail better” our debut song from our musical collaboration - we call The News.  The collaboration started early 2016, and most of our songs were recorded during the summer, and we are finally starting to put them out into the world.  We will be releasing them all as singles, and we fear that in the playlist culture we live in currently, the idea of taking an entire body of songs and throw them into the world, may simply be too much and fall on deaf ears.  Like the Beckett quote we based our song from, distilling down the end piece to a manageable chunk, may be easier on the audience, but may in the long term, misconstrue the intent of the author.

When dealing within the pop milieu, there are so many cliches and pitfalls to songwriting, or at least that is how we feel it is, and frankly, any thoughts or feeling you are going to try and convey, undoubtedly have been illustrated by a poet far better than you could have ever hoped.  

That said, we strive to apply context to our songs by anchoring them firmly within an ideology that we mutually could agree upon, as we feel it rings true to both our ears. It is with this in mind that we both agreed to firmly base our song “fail better” within the framework of Samuel Beckett’s 1983 work “worstward ho!.” Perhaps it reads as pretentious or silly to base your framework on a piece of prose that frankly was written as a parody of another work by Charles Kingsley a hundred years prior, but there is something about the quote “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better..” that has resonated with readers and interpreters since its writing nearly 35 years ago, and that seemed like a good enough reason to explore it.

The fact remains though, this quote is often grabbed out of context and is often seen as some sort of self help mantra, which honestly, we do not feel was the intent of the author, but it is easy to see how that meaning can be applied when you don’t read the rest of the prose and all the darkness that surrounds it.  

For “fail better,” it is that cutting edge, just below the surface that we longed to embody. Upon first glance, perhaps this is just another “what have you done for me lately,” woman empowerment pop song, but honestly, that is not where we are coming from.  It is that struggle between substance and headlines, and that drifting back and forth between people in our lives that we know are toxic, but we find ourselves returning to those places again and again, that drives this song.  

This is our first song, and honestly, you never know if anyone is going to hear what you make, so that said, it most probably will be our most honest perspective we will have, as it is a song, simply not informed by an audience in any shape or form.  

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better..” is a case study in the idea of success and whether or not it is a concept that really exists in life, and although we can’t encapsulate that big philosophical idea in a pop song, it can certainly help inform the character within the song. This is not self help material for sure, but writing the song was.

rachel + ben

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