Is it a journey, or is it a place?

Apropos of my recent post on treating the sections of your song separately, I received this very thoughtful reply from a Mastodon friend:

This is really helpful and has clarified something for me.

I struggle with creating structure in my tunes and need to work on them being a journey rather than a place (unless I absolutely want them to be a place)

I was so inspired by this; what an excellent distinction to draw! It really bears interrogating: is the thing you’re currently working on supposed to be a journey, or is it supposed to be a place?

If it’s supposed to be a journey, but it sounds too much like a place, then that’s not ideal, and probably needs fixing.

But if it’s supposed to be a place, then trying to make it be a journey would be equally inappropriate!

You can’t define success until you’ve defined the goal — jamie