It took Mark Twain years of writing to realize a simple and overlooked fact.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
The long-form gives the writer time to make mistakes, time to redeem them, time to introduce a slew of new ideas that might or might not work, and allows them to let everything rip. But to write small means tuning each word to the perfect pitch, refining the flow and meaning with far less at your disposal.
So it’s always exceptional to hear music that does something similar: it takes big ideas and narratives and packs them into two lines, poetry in staccato but rarely crescendo, an essay’s worth of meaning in ten words and endless inference.
Splat 154