I don’t know enough about music to speak on this intelligently, but maybe simple music is as hard to master as simple writing.
Derek Sivers and Scott Adams both have great posts on this.
Of course this is a fine line, right?
I mean, a seven-year-old can write an extremely simple sentence. But it won’t have the same complexity and texture as Hemingway writing a sentence that’s not far off.
Get it?
On the fundamental level – I think that clarity is hard – regardless of medium.
“Jonas and I are good at melodies, but there were too many things happening on the track,” Ekberg recalls. “Denniz was very good at erasing things, and making the sound picture cleaner, and simplified. I think he took away maybe fifty percent of our instrumentation.” As Denniz once said, in response to a question about how hard could it possibly be to write such simple songs, “it’s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial.”
-John Seabrook, The Song Machine (Amazon)