Recapturing The Magic Of That First Demo

How many times have you recorded a demo of a song that was great (with obvious flaws and recording issues), but when you went to rerecord it you couldn't capture "the magic" again?

I can't even begin to tell you how many frustrating times this has happened to me. This year, during the February Album Writing Month (FAWM.org) I tried my best to set up a decent recording no matter what I did, but sometimes inspiration was flowing and I just had to commit the idea to hard disk or risk losing it entirely.

So, I wrote a song in one take called "As They Please". I had just learned a new tuning and this was the song that came out of that. I recorded in one take and got most of the lyrics and most of the melody that I would want to use.

There were definitely things that weren't good, but there was a lot I really liked. So for the last week or so I've been relearning this song (because I hadn't tried playing it since). It wasn't too bad and I made a video of myself playing the fingerings (so that I could review it in the future if need be and so I could teach others the song). I can now play the song pretty easily and I've added a short instrumental segment to break up the mostly verse-y-ness of the song.

I just don't think my newest takes quite have that "magic touch" that the original had.

I'm going to keep trying to get a good recording, but I think I'll limit myself to to or three takes max per evening, that way it's still fresh and not to over thought. This is hard to do, but I'm going to try my best to make it happen.

Anyone else out there relate to this? What are YOUR experiences?