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:

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.