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: