Record producer/writer here. You're on the nose with this. Simplicity and clarity are skills, like writing essays, that are refined over many many years to make

Record producer/writer here. You're on the nose with this. Simplicity and clarity are skills, like writing essays, that are refined over many many years to make something appear effortless. You also allude to it, but there is a staggering amount of unseen effort that also goes into the writing and arranging of the song. Listeners only experience the end product and the final arrangement. For simple melodies it seems very obvious that that's how they should have been all along, but hidden behind that apparent simplicity can be hours and hours of false starts, dead-end paths, and a constant paring-down of complexity in some cases. It's not uncommon for me and a collaborator to write a full sketch for a song (verses, choruses, lyrics, etc) before hitting on a groove or turn of phrase in the bridge that absolutely KILLS. Quite often what happens is that we discard the entire rest of the song and build something new around this new inspiring nugget of musical gold. This will quite often turn into an entirely new song with a very different feel, message etc. It's a musical moment or hook that we would not have arrived at had we not gone through the whole process leading up to it. I've never regretted having had to go through the preceding steps to arrive there. It's always welcomed by the collaborators in the room and it's easy for us not to get stuck in a sunk-cost fallacy because it brought us to the place we're at now.