Getting Closer

The other day, I explored the reasons for my hiatus from songwriting (and the parallel hiatus from blogging about songwriting). I could mention that I've also stopped writing in my journal and stopped drawing compulsively and stopped playing my guitar almost constantly, reserving the latter for the last week or two before a show. I started that post with no idea that's what I wanted to write about, let alone where I was going to come out on the issue. Today I reread the post, and I think it's only about half to two-thirds crap.

I think I'm getting close to the mark when I talk about the emotional toll songwriting can take, and maybe even the notion that I needed a rest after such a long period of creativity, but all the stuff about just sort of ignoring the ideas and what not? I don't know; that sounds pretty fishy to me.

Maybe what I mean is, there's material all around me that I could be writing songs about, but I prefer not to acknowledge it. I prefer to turn away. Mind you, I'm not talking about the plight of the underprivileged or corruption or that kind of thing. It's dead easy to look outward and get preachy. It may not be easy to write well about it, but at least it's easy to contemplate it; it's even satisfying. Rather, I'm talking about hard things: looking inward and facing personal things I'd rather ignore.

I reckon most of my non-writing for these months has stemmed more from avoidance than from exhaustion. I make it sound like all good songwriting is like therapy. On the contrary, I suspect a lot of really bad songwriting is like therapy. My songs that consistently get the best response from audiences are the ones that are a bit funny rather than deep, probing, electric wire plugged into your soul kinds of things. But I know that I can't properly write lighter stuff if I can't confront the heavy.

This all seems to contradict the posts that really started off this blog, in which I talked about the mis-impression people have about songs being confessional. And here I am, two posts in a row, talking about how hard (or exhausting) it can be to be too confessional. Maybe I can reconcile this, maybe not.

When I say that I'm turning away from things around me, I'm talking about being unwilling to confront various personal issues and see where they lead in my writing. "Shudder," "She Walked Away," "Terminal," "Dawn" -- these are all songs (just a few among many) that started in a deeply personal place but which, thanks to voice and character and metaphor and other normal art things are also comfortably distant. They affect me in performance in the same way "Moonshiner" (traditional) or "Pueblo Waltz" (Townes Van Zandt) or any other good song affects me: not as intrinsic parts of myself but as songs I especially like that have special meaning for me. "Falling," I have to admit, was a little closer to the bone, and it was a long time to before I could perform it. I kept putting it on set lists and then dropping it at the last minute. But now it, too, is a thing apart; a song that I perform as a sort of character rather than remaining entirely myself.

Yet I haven't written anything really hard since "Falling." By the way, I wrote "Pain Rhymes so Good" at roughly the same time that I wrote "Falling." Funny how I wrote a song about being too happy to write sad songs at the same time that I wrote a song about lovers making each other feel invisible. For me to write well, I now realize, I can't be afraid of the dark. Regardless of whether I'm writing light or heavy songs, I have to be open to things that worry or frighten or depress me. It's easy to try to be analytical about other people's dark stuff, but unless I can relate to something in a personal way, it's hard for me to write about it convincingly. So the hard thing for me is looking at my own stuff and trying to be harsh enough, honest enough to see what's really there. I don't succeed that often, and recently I haven't really felt like looking. But I'm trying, and the songs are coming again.

Most of the songs mentioned in this post are available via the "Demo" widget. I haven't ever put "Falling" on the Web though. Here it is:

Blogging Songwriting

My last published entry here is about why I hadn't written anything in awhile, and it talks about how busy I'd been with work and coaching little league and so forth. Today I came here to do a quick post about how I've been too busy to post anything, and I thought, wow, little league just started again (this time the Fall season), and work is as busy as ever, and school's just started back for the kids, and I can go on and on.

The thing is, you either do something or you don't do it. At one point, I did "blogging"; clearly, at another point, I stopped it. If I'm honest, the same is true of songwriting. For most of 2006, I couldn't stop myself from writing songs. I wrote more songs in 2006 than I wrote in the previous 15 years put together, probably. But that fire hose of creativity has been more of a drinking straw for most of this year. And I ask myself, "what happened?"

But I know what happened. My creative impulses didn't stop firing, I didn't stop having ideas. I just stopped paying attention to them, probably around the time I started blogging about why I wasn't blogging. In some ways, writing songs just stopped being a priority for awhile. There are lots of good reasons for that. For one thing, they were kind of piling up, and I was starting to feel like I should make the ones I've already got better (yeah, that sounds weak to me too). But mainly, I have a pretty full life, and compulsive songwriting tends sometimes to drain my attention and energy away from other things that really matter to me.

If I'm honest, though, there's also this other thing. The deep emotional toll that writing can take, when I write the way "I most want to write" (as Melville called it). At our last show, someone asked about one that's tough to play off: a song I've called in the past "A Metaphor in Search of a Song" but I've retitled simply "Falling." I used to really hedge my bets on that song, telling people it came out of my trying to describe how a migraine felt (which is a version of the truth, but it's certainly not the whole truth). It's more accurate, though more surprising if you hear "Falling," for me to call it a love song. That's a surprising description because it's about the hard parts of real, lived love, the times where you don't always connect, where you see past each other, where you don't quite feel liked by your lover.

So the question naturally arises, is it autobiographical? As the audience member asked Shelle after the show, "were you guys going through a rough time when he wrote that?" If this can make any sense at all, that question is both beside the point and it is precisely the point. It's beside the point because there's no key to understanding the song that lies in a specific event, no hidden meaning waiting to be teased out by a secret life experience. It is what it is, and I hope it describes something that can be understood pretty universally by anyone who's been in a real relationship for any amount of time.

On the other hand, if it does resonate with people, it can only be because it tells the truth in some way, comes from somewhere authentic. So in that respect, the question of it's relationship to my life (or to our life, in this case) could be uncomfortably close to the mark. Shelle and I have been together for nearly twenty years, and if you think every day of that has been sunny, maybe you live in the Magic Kingdom. It should come as no great shock that a deep, abiding love yields material for complex, sometimes dark songs. But we don't ordinarily go around shining flashlights into the dark corners of our personal lives and asking people to look at them, contemplate them, compare them to their own secret corners. And of course that's not exactly what I'm doing anyway. You start with something true, then you play around with character and voice and so forth to make it work. Even with the distance and the defense of fiction, though, it can feel pretty exposed.

It looks like I've gone way around my ass to get to my elbow, but I think I'm circling back around. What I've been driving toward is this: any kind of personal writing takes a toll. I've been making excuses about not blogging, but what's been going on here is a bit of a murky mirror of what's been going on in other aspects of my creative life. It takes a lot of time, sure, but time isn't the main thing that's kept me away from writing. As soon as a song you're working on spills off the page and into the air, you become aware of reactions. It takes effort to tune out your censor who's worried about other people's feelings and just focus on the story you're trying to tell, trusting that it will be OK. My family understands this, and they give me the distance I need to write, but somehow I feel really tired anyway after a long time of productivity.

Why am I writing all this now? Because I feel that I'm waking up from a long period of "rest." My censors are falling away and the ideas are nagging me with greater urgency. I'm writing down more, taking things further, and worrying less than I have over the past months, in spite of being "busier" than I have been. So maybe I'll finally start blogging again. Time will tell, I guess.