She Cut Her Hair
According to my journal, "She Cut Her Hair" was the working title of "She Walked Away" in the early weeks of its life. I was playing on Billy Bragg's version of "Walk Away Renee" which ends, "And then one day it happened: she cut her hair and I quit loving her." The concept of the song, at that stage, was to portray the end of a relationship that would have no lasting effect on the characters involved. It's narrated from the male point of view (though not first person), and he's left standing there contemplating not the meaning of life, but trivia, such as "a taste in his mouth." In the earliest version, he wonders if the taste might be a new lip gloss.
The song continued in that vein, with the man's detachment growing as the literal distance increases between them. As he "feels himself forgetting" the little unexplained lover's memories -- "the museum, the parking lot, those jeans she'd always wear" (at one point it was "the museum, the ferry ride, those awful bands she loved") -- her impact on his life seems to be fading from his consciousness along with those memories.
Then came a clearly-defined turning point: I wrote in my journal about "listening to Graceland"; a lyric from that song changed my "She Walked Away" (as I was by then calling it). Paul Simon sang, "losing love is like a window in your heart: Everybody sees you're blown apart." And I realized what I was trying to write was a lie.
Or at least it was not emotionally honest to pretend that two people could just walk away without any damage. It might make for a clever song, maybe even an interesting song, but it wasn't the basis for a true song. The influence of the Graceland lyric is direct. The first change I made was to add the bridge:
Maybe they'll both feel the damage
Maybe they'll be blown apart
Maybe he'll fell so transparent
Like the world can see his heart.
The rest of the changes were pretty small. It didn't take much from there to suggest that the character is engaging in wishful thinking by trying to convince himself that it won't matter. But changing the tone of the song also helped a number of the images coalesce and provided the sense of disorientation I needed for the refrain -- "How should he feel?" and "He knows it's not real?"
I said above that before changing the song it wasn't true, yet I've said in an earlier post that this song isn't literally about me. So here's why that's not a contradiction. Of course I've had my share of "walking away" scenes in my life, and I certainly drew on bits of my own history for the song. Because of where and who I was in my life as I wrote the song, I think I had a lot invested in construing things as if those scenes had had no impact on my life, certainly no lasting impact. I remember hearing Bono years ago make a long, rambling speech upon receipt of some Grammy or another. He said writing good music was fundamentally about the decision to reveal rather than to conceal. Always seemed odd to me, but I finally understood it, I think, when I changed this song. I think he meant that it's not good enough to tell yourself, "this isn't about me" and write a bit of fluff. I guess, if you want to write a song that's true, you have to start by being truthful with yourself. To write this song, I had to risk a little bit of transparency; I had to be willing to admit that I had felt the damage, and that in some ways, maybe I still do.
4 comments:
I've been meaning to comment on your post "confessional"; it made me think of many things and it's taken time to sort them out. I had wanted to say something about how it's understandable that people treat a song of the sort leven mentions as being a *literal* confession.
At first I was going to say, well, this shows that such people are lacking in a kind of literary or artistic sophistication. I think art requires truth: even a novel requires psychological truths about how people act and think--when it works. When it doesn't acheive that, it's no good. It's no good because it's deeply false in some way, and we the readers feel that.
So my thinking about this is that literature and songwriting both--arts that portary these psychological truths-- require the writer to convey truths. These need not be true in the literal sense of portraying the actual situation of the author. They don't. But to get at the universal truths the writer must look within, at truths from her own experience. To create a character requires an act of the sympathetic imagination, to think oneself into the character's situation, to know how he would act and feel and why--no matter how unlike the writer he is.
But how does one do that, acquire that sympathetic imagination? the first place and primary one is always the writer's own understanding of himself: this is how i have felt, and when, and why. That's the jumping off point that enables the imagination of someone else's situation Why else are first novels so often obviously autobiographical?--
the Bono quote: He said writing good music was fundamentally about the decision to reveal rather than to conceal.
this seems exactly right to me. It's always about revealing. As you say, it requires a certain emotional honesty: one has to take the risk, or else not write truth. The writer starts from his or her own experience and understanding, mining it for emotional truths that are universal.
It seems to me that while this is about this song and how it came to be, it's also about what is always required, for writing songs or novels or plays or poems. Anything. I think it's a condition for art.
And to go on writing always requires a kind of selfexposure. Always. No matter how fictional the end produce, how removed the situation portrayed is from one's own, it always starts from where we've been. It's painful; it's not easy. But it is how art is made and what it does--so I think.
If that's not there, that emotional honesty, we don't respond to the work. The characters are unbelievable, we say, etc. What we mean is there's that feeling of falsity. Nothing's revealed: no kind of universal psychological truth conveyed.
So you've kind of beaten me to it, with this post. Serves me right for not putting this down sooner!
hope this made sense, rather late and tired and this is not as well explained as I'd like. more to say, will leave this for now.
yrs
O
Thanks for this thoughtful and thought-provoking comment, O. I will need to read it over a few more times, I think. But on a first read, what you say makes me think of a famous quote from kafka (which I don't have it in front of me of course). He says something like, "we don't need the kind of books that make us happy; those are the books we could write ourselves if we wanted to. We need books that wound us; we need books to be the axe to the frozen sea in our souls." To the extent my memory is accurate, I think K is (characteristically) overdoing it a bit: I, for one, do need the kind of books (and songs) that make me happy. But I do think it speaks to the kind of thing you raise about portraying psychological truth, and about how we feel it when it's false. Or rather, we fail to feel it, and thereby know it's not true, if that makes any sense.
Thanks again!
-p
sorry, in rush--yes, i agree with that, always loved that kafka bit--But only the end, about the axe. It's about unlocking that frozen sea.
My claim would be that to have that impact of an axe on the reader, the artist turns the scalpel on himself to get at what lies underneath.
Sometimes it's less painful than others, it's just turning the lights on and seeing what's illuminated.
I've mixed enough metaphors and been vague enough here--and i'm late late late!
I'm liking reading here tho, and had to write!
in haste
O
Great work.
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