The Song That Came Before Dawn

I always keep my phone beside the bed for moments like this. It is not the first time it has happened to me. Sometimes words or music arrive at night, while the mind is still somewhere between sleep and waking.

Usually, it is simple: you pick up the phone, open the recorder and capture what you can hear inside yourself.

But that night I was not sleeping alone.

Dictating or singing into a phone at half past three in the morning while another person is asleep beside you is, to put it mildly, not particularly convenient. So for a while I went through a ridiculous but very real struggle: should I record it or not?

At first, I decided I would remember.

I repeated the lines silently. Then again. And again. I kept repeating the melody, trying to hold every word and every inflection until morning.

But that half-awake state works in a strange way. Your eyes may be open, yet your brain keeps slipping back into sleep. You fall asleep, wake up, drift off again — and at some point you notice that the words are beginning to disappear.

Even after the twentieth repetition.

That night I felt it with particular clarity: sometimes losing a single word is enough to change the entire line.

The rhythm changes. The meaning changes. The inflection that may have been the reason the whole thing appeared in the first place is gone.

In the morning, you may remember the general idea. You may even reconstruct a similar melody. But it will no longer be exactly what came to you during the night. A retelling remains, while the living, precise thought itself disappears.

And I realised that I was beginning to lose those exact words right then.

So I finally forced myself to reach for the phone and quietly sing the line. Then another one. I captured the melody as well as I could in that moment.

Perhaps I disturbed the person beside me.

But the song remained.

I am telling this story not because a song arriving at night is some extraordinary event. On the contrary, I know that something similar happens to many people.

Ideas rarely ask whether this is a convenient moment.

They may come on public transport. In the street. In the middle of a conversation. While waiting in line. While driving — in which case, of course, you must stop safely first. They may appear in a public place where speaking out loud feels awkward. Or at night, while someone is asleep next to you and you have no wish to disturb them.

And there is almost always a reason to tell yourself: “I’ll remember. I’ll write it down later.”

But “later” often never comes.

A few minutes pass and we are distracted by a message, a conversation, the road, work, someone else’s question or our own tiredness. The state in which the thought appeared cannot simply be summoned again on command.

Not because the idea was bad.

We simply failed to catch it.

I often told my students, and repeated in my seminars, that for me Pushkin is a genius not only because great lines formed in his mind.

He is a genius because he managed to capture them.

We will never know how many remarkable phrases, melodies, stories and images came to people and disappeared forever. Perhaps some of them could have become songs, poems, films or books. But they were never recorded — and therefore, as far as the world is concerned, they were never born.

The arrival of an idea does not yet create a work of art.

There is a long road between a moment of inspiration and a finished piece. But that road begins at its most fragile point: the rough note. A few words typed into a phone. A voice message to yourself. A melody sung unevenly. A single chord. A description of an image that, for now, only you can see.

It may look ridiculous, awkward and nothing at all like the future song.

But this is where the song begins.

It is important not only to capture these moments, but to keep them.

Collect the drafts. Return to them. Examine them. Turn separate phrases into lyrics, fragments of melody into demos, and chance observations into future stories.

Not every recording will become a finished work. Nor should it.

Sometimes a single line waits several years for its moment. Sometimes a melody recorded at night joins a lyric that appears much later. Sometimes an old draft unexpectedly explains something you could not put into words today.

Drafts are not a warehouse of failed works.

They are an archive of possibilities not yet lived.

Today we have an enormous advantage: modern tools allow us to preserve a thought at almost any moment.

This is not an advertisement for a particular app or device. Use whatever tool happens to be within reach.

A phone recorder. Notes. A message to yourself. A small notebook. Music software. A camera. Even a few words sent to your own chat if nothing else is available.

The tool is not what matters.

What matters is not allowing the moment to disappear.

Because the state we are experiencing, the words we suddenly hear within ourselves, and the music that becomes perfectly clear for a few seconds exist here and now.

A minute later, they may already be gone.

In the morning, I listened to the recording I had made during the night.

It was, of course, very quiet. A sleepy voice, a few lines, a melody without accompaniment — nothing resembling a finished song.

But the most important thing had survived.

The feeling.

The inflection.

The exact words I had already begun to lose.

I do not yet know what this song will become. I do not know how many times the lyric will change, what the arrangement will sound like, or when anyone else will hear it.

But now it has a chance to be born.

Only because, at half past three in the morning, I finally reached for my phone.