New, Quick Work

I used to write songs quickly, then make quick and dirty recordings of them, then stick them up on my old blog with a little write up and just go with it. I guess the reason I stopped doing that was because I quit recording stuff quickly, then I quit writing quickly, then I sort of quit writing.

Last night I once again wrote and recorded a quick song, so I'm posting it. When I say quick, I mean less than an hour from concept to uploaded. I was playing around responding to a great flash story about breaking up with the comma -- a story with no commas in it at all. So I wrote a brief narrative about a blues song with no "C"s in it -- neither the letter nor the note. Once I'd gone to the trouble of writing the ultra simple lyric (which really doesn't have any "C"s), I decided to go ahead and put some music with it. I cheated on the key though: it's in G, which does, in fact, contain plenty of "C"s.

Well, without further fluff, here's "Break of Day":

[Break Of Day]

Stay Close

I changed up the demo widget because I realized it's had the same old recordings on it for over a year. And also we have a new recording of "She Walked Away," which I thought ought to supersede the ones already over there. While I was at it, I added a recording of a newish song, "Stay Close to Me," which I briefly mentioned back when I first performed it. That song has come to be a favorite of ours, and it's a song people talk to us about a lot.

First, I reckon I ought to own up to my inspiration for the song: There's a scene near the end of Deathly Hallows (yes, the Harry Potter book) where Harry is really scared, and he whispers to a sort of vision of his dead mother, "Stay close to me." And it just made my face hurt when I read it, I was so moved. If you've read the book, I'm sure you know the scene. I won't go more into it because this isn't a book report. I don't really know why it struck me so, but there you go.

I knew right away I wanted to write something called "Stay Close to Me" that evoked some of what I felt in that passage -- the sense of vulnerability in the face of fear, maybe. And I wanted it to be distant enough from the source that I wouldn't have to go around calling it "that Harry Potter song" for people to get it. I also wanted it to be a simple song. I have a tendency to overwrite things, to use six words where one will do, to use broad epic similes instead of just coming out and saying what I mean, to ramble along in multiple, dependent-clause-infused sentences like this one when I should be moving along to the next thought. So I was determined eschew verbosity and to keep the imagery sparse. It did not take long to get a draft worked up, but I had to fight hard all along not to keep adding verses and a bridge and more transitional material and so forth. During revision, I ended up cutting a lot of excess baggage to pare it down to this:

    

Stay Close to Me

Darkness closes in on me
I can't see the way ahead
But if I know you'll stay with me
Then I can face this dread

Stay close to me
I don't want to be alone
Stay close to me
I'm sinking like a stone

My heart is beating in its cage
I'm embarrassed by my fear
But the strength I need is in your gaze
And now my path seems clear

Stay close to me
I can't do this alone
Stay close to me
With you I'm almost home

Stay close to me
Stay close to me

Townes Van Zandt

Something I share with a great many musicians and songwriters is a love for Townes Van Zandt's songs. Something I may share with fewer is a love for a 2001 record called Townes Van Zandt Live at McCabes, based on an intimate concert that took place in Santa Monica two years before Van Zandt's inevitable early death. I have recommended this CD to friends only to have them come back to me and say, "did I get the right record? that was pretty bad."

By certain objective measures of good-record-ness, I suppose I can see why people don't like Live at McCabes. In fact, I often hedge my bets by saying it's my favorite "bad record." Bad because Townes sometimes sounds so weary, you think he might be too tired or too drunk to play. Like maybe he won't make it all the way to the end of the show. His fingers kind of scrawl and scrape on the strings and his voice scratches and waivers past the notes like a man trying to aim a pistol with a hangover. He'll start off a song, then seem to lose the beat for a second or stop altogether to bark off a laugh, maybe tell something funny he just thought of. And the audience's laughter at these times often seems a little forced, almost nervous.

So there's a roughness to the whole thing that's more than the ordinary lack of polish for a live record. I guess it's this rawness that turns people away from it. Why I like this album so much better than any mere collection of Townes Van Zandt songs is, I suppose, as much of a personal matter as it is something intrinsic to the disk.

At some point, I became aware that Townes Van Zandt was "important" and "influential." The way you come to realize you should listen not only to Bob Dylan but to Woody Guthrie too, even if you suspect in the heart of your heart that listening to Woody Guthrie will make you want to put a rock through your radio. I had started to recognize Van Zandt's songs and name all over the place: My wife and I had learned his "Tecumseh Valley" off a Nanci Griffith record, and I'd heard various versions of a Steve Earle anecdote declaring that Townes Van Zandt was the best songwriter ever. Then there was Willie Nelson singing Townes's "Pancho and Lefty" and the Cowboy Junkies covering "To Live's to Fly" and all that kind of thing. I decided I needed to go to the horse's mouth, as it were, and get hold of some Townes Van Zandt albums to listen to.

When I take a mind to get to know about something, my first stop is usually the library, and our local DeKalb County Public has a pretty good CD collection for what it is. So I figured to check out all the Townes Van Zandt CDs I could find. But the thing about that CD collection is, it's made up of donated records, which is to say, chiefly stuff people bought and didn't like. It turned out, therefore, the only Townes Van Zandt album on the rack was this one, Live at McCabes. I checked it out and took it to work the next day to listen through headphones while sitting in my quasi-efficient, open-backed cubicle with its pilled side fabric, florescent lighting, and overhead storage like a Greyhound bus.

At first, I was kind of put off by those things I have described, the creakiness and the sort of wild playing and all that. But soon I was also getting pulled in by the sound in my headphones, the scraping chairs and throats clearing in the quiet parts. And the exposed rawness in the voice, creating a feeling almost of embarrassment, like sitting too close in somebody's living room when he's playing you a song and you don't know quite where to look. At one point, the singer jokes, "boy, if it gets any quieter in here, I'm going to preach a sermon." Another burst of nervous laughter. There's a sense in these moments that the audience is witnessing a kind of struggle, some profound wrestling match between the man sitting before them and something unseen. Or maybe I'm just describing my own reaction, because somewhere along the line I crossed over completely from my nondescript beige cubicle. Fell right through in my imagination into the fidgety, small-room audience witnessing this balancing act between revelation and self-destruction.

Toward the end of the record, there're a couple of light, jokey numbers with Kelly Joe Phelps sitting in on Dobro, and then a hushed, long, mostly spoken new song, "Marie." A dirge of a song, a homeless man's desperate resignation to his lover's death and his own impotence in the face of it. By the end of "Marie," I was surprised to discover I was weeping. Not misting over, you understand, but sitting at work, slacks and buttondown, expensive laptop and all, and crying like a beggar in the rain. I'm hoping to hell no one will try to talk to me because my eyes are full up and my throat is hot and tight, beyond speech. The shock of it brought me back to time and place, and I got up and went to wash my face and so forth. No harm done to my day job.

Since then I've listened to a lot of his records, and frankly very few of them are great beyond being good gatherings of exceptional songs. Live at the Old Quarter is very good, and if I remember correctly, I really like High, Low and In Between. Ultimately he's a songwriter who's songs are greater than any single collection of them or any single recording or performance of any particular one. There's a new release of Live at McCabes out that starts out with a different song ("The Hole" rather than "Pueblo Waltz") and swaps out a couple other tracks here and there. All-in-all, the new one feels a bit slicker, lacks a little bit of the rawness that I responded to on the initial release. On the other hand, this one is missing a studio demo that follows "Marie" and mars the end of the original. I don't know which record most closely resembles the actual 1995 concert; for me the performance took place inside my head ten years later in a bland office cubicle in Atlanta.

Being the Bad Guy

Andy Whitman is just about my favorite music critic. Among other things, he writes for Paste magazine, and I always look for his reviews first. He recently wrote a blog post for Paste extolling a record by Jacob Goldman called Revenge Songs. I haven't heard the record (it's not out yet), but I was taken by Whitman's description of it, especially a song called "Zero Integrity": I never claimed to be the better man / I've got no integrity to cling to.

Thing is, most songwriters can’t resist a little touch of pro-singer spin. Neil Young’s “guitar fighting the TV” or Paul Simon’s assurance that he, too, was “concerned with the child she carried.” It takes something for a character to reveal his own shit-heeledness without flinching. To say flat out, "I've got no integrity to cling to."

I think there's something worth exploiting in that difficulty, the tendency characters have (oh, hell, that we all have) to take that little turn away from the harsh light of self-examination and put in a little plug for themselves. Though I'm not saying I'm any good at this, at turning that light on myself. For one thing, as I've discussed in this space before, I'm no great pour-your-soul-out confessional songwriter. And the truth is, it's part of my own lowness of character to lack the forthrightness to face my own failings with that kind of courage.

So I go at this from another angle, creating characters who don't seem to realize what wretches they are. Who keep telling themselves or their lovers or whoever will listen, "Any one of you'd have done the same thing," or "I'm not the man you think I've been; / Just let me hold you close tonight." Does it make good songs? Probably not as good as those of braver writers, but I like them.

Visions and Revisions

What writer doesn't love Eliot's formulation in "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" about "visions and revisions"? And who doesn't wish he had time for hundred before tea?

I'm sure I wasn't alone in my sophomore days as a writer in coming down on the "Visions" side of the equation. I thought writing -- especially writing songs -- was 99% inspiration and only 1% perspiration (as the cliché has it). I'd get ideas and furiously write them down as they came to me, reaching for the rhymes a bit, but mostly taking the ideas down in a steady stream. The real challenge from there was to make the music work with the text. Thus, the songs that worked the best for me were ones in which music and lyric came at the same time and inspiration at least did me the favor a following a consistent rhythm and rhyme scheme.

Over time, though, I've come to appreciate how much craft and technique lies behind the art. I still don't fully subscribe to "rules" about making a good song, but understanding how to write a "three-minute movie" song -- that is, how to write a typical hook-based song -- is invaluable to knowing how to write something different when you want to. It's like making sure you really understand the five-paragraph essay before you try to break away from it. To be perfectly honest, when I got to college, I abandoned the standard essay structure so completely, I went from always getting "A"s in English to getting "B"s and "C"s for a couple of years. Similarly, there are ways in which the little songs I wrote when I was 15 and 16 were better than some things I wrote after getting "serious" about songwriting.

About over a decade ago I found myself hanging around with some really good poets. I had the opportunity to observe them writing and revising and to participate in conversations about what made a passage or a line or a word better and what made things worse. I learned how to take (some) criticism without getting pissed off, what hard work revision is, and how to try to make things more concrete, more vivid. On the other hand, I also developed a tendency toward overly-philosophical themes and highfalutin language that I wouldn't shake for years to come.

Here's a revision I made around that time. My song "So Many People" used to start like this:

You're goddamn right! I shot 'em all.
I got me a handgun and went straight to the mall.

In order to make it more specific, more vivid, I changed it to

You're goddamn right! I shot 'em all.
Bought a gun at a pawn shop, took a cab to the mall.

Doesn't change the sense of the line one whit: the plot advances in exactly the same way, with the character acquiring a gun and heading to the mall (where he's fixin' to do some damage). But the revised version gives us some important detail and tells us a little something about the character. (Where I'm from, if you go to a pawn shop for a gun and take a cab to the mall, you're low status. A rich guy would already have a gun or buy it at a sporting goods store, and then he'd drive to the mall.)

With regard to the relationship between vision and revision, those two factors can meet across a gap of time. I often have an idea for a song, maybe a partial chorus or a couple of lines, but I don't have much time to spend on it. Some years back, I would have either written the whole song or just let it drop. Now I write what I can as quickly as I can, and then put it away. I look back over my fragments periodically to keep them percolating in the back of my mind, but other than that I don't worry too much about it. I've learned to trust this "vision" stage to develop on its own and to not feel anxious about not finishing songs.

The song "Victimless Crime" started with a pretty simple idea: I was driving by a wreck on the highway and thinking about how hard it is for people not to look, and I had the idea to juxtapose that image with a "hit and run" relationship, maybe with the victim sitting in the corner of a bar. So I came up with a few lines -- "He sees the car crash in the corner, but he's pretending not to notice." And right away I at least had a little bit of a story and a couple of characters. I probably heard the term "Victimless Crime" on the news in some context while I was driving by the wreck, because the phrase was already in my mind, and I wanted it to use it to ironically -- a character insisting, in the very presence of his victim, that his was a victimless crime.

After jotting down half a verse and half a chorus, though, I let it sit for weeks without even thinking about it. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea in my mind, and I started the hundred visions and revisions that would eventually become the song. The final (and hardest) major revision was to get rid of the idea that led to the song in the first place. I had changed "He sees the car crash in the corner" to "He sees the wreckage in the corner," but I finally faced up to reason, and the first stanza became:

He sees her sitting in the corner
But he's pretending not to notice
He likes to think she's none the worse for wear.
He turns back for another drink
And disregards the damage
Wondering why the hell she's even there.

I came to realize the crash imagery worked against the song, making it harder for the listener to understand the setting. It's one thing to add information gradually -- we don't really know it's a bar until "He turns back for another drink." But when a song opens with a confusing or nonsensical image, the "poetic" conceit often isn't worth the disorientation. Or put differently, expecting your listener to get from a car crash to a bar stool that quickly might stretch things a bit. In the end, the vision that gave rise to the song became a burden to the more important characters and story line, and it took some heavy-handed revision to clear away the unnecessary parts.

I'll leave it there rather than going through draft after draft and line after line. But next time, I think I'll write about a completely different kind of songwriting: starting with the music, picking a line purely for it's rhythm to work through the melody, and then letting the words sort of coalesce around that initial phrase.

Feast and Famine

Back at the beginning of November I started but never finished a post about a song I had recently completed called "Stay Close to Me." I just reread the paragraphs I wrote, and it's interesting to look back at that time when I was coming out of a long dry spell and had just finished a "good" song. I had a few blog posts prior to that and had hoped to keep writing about writing, but now I can honestly say I've been pouring my writing energy into songs instead of blogging: Since Summer's end, I've written five complete songs, and I've started at least as many and left them in various states of completion. Some of those will become complete songs, others will die away and never see the light of day. But I think it's safe to say my creativity has gone from a slow drip to a steady stream over a couple of months.

Who can say what triggers these things? If you know me, you won't be surprised to learn that I've had a marked increase in migraine activity during this time, averaging two headaches a week since I started keeping track in early November. But there's always a chicken and egg question there, and a general increase in creative activity doesn't always translate into more and better songs.

As much as anything, I think I benefited from some workshops I did this Fall with fourth and fifth graders. Every year, each class in my kids' school performs a song for an annual "Peace Celebration" in January. This year, my son's teacher decided to let some of the kids have a crack at writing their song themselves. With some help.

We agreed that I would work out a basic structure and melody ahead of time, and then conduct sessions with the kids to help them write lyrics. The kids worked very hard, coming up with pages and pages of rhyming couplets on their own, and then we worked as a group to select, edit, and refine lyrics that made sense together and fit the music. After three sessions, we had a pretty good draft of the song, and after just some minor revisions to smooth out a line here or there, I was able to give them a demo recording to rehearse with.

They (and their teacher) report having enjoyed the process and being proud of the results. But what I didn't count on was how great it was for me! Teaching songwriting to fourth and fifth graders somehow flipped a switch in my brain that really helped me in my own writing.

Working with the kids, I couldn't just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Instead, we had to approach songwriting in a very straightforward, practical way and use techniques to quickly work through problems and get on with it. So, for example, if we got stuck on a line, we would start brainstorming rhymes or ways of restating a line to create an easier rhyme (if that was the problem). We'd just write all the ideas on the board until something jumped out as the best answer. I've started using these same kinds of strategies in my own writing and damn if they don't work just as well for me as they did for nine and ten year olds!

We like to think of songwriting as this transcendental process in which disembodied voices speak through the writer directly into the purest art. The truth is, even when song seems to "write itself" in the first draft, I think most songwriters revise and rework the text through at least another draft or two to make them better. I think for my next post (or next couple of posts) I'll give some examples of this process -- show some "revision maps" of song fragments and talk about what I was thinking and why I made the changes.

Here's a list of my new songs, just for the heck of it:

• Stay Close to Me
• Victimless Crime
• In My Arms Tonight
• Without a Trace
• The Stone is Heavy

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.

Stuff

In recent weeks, I've been rather busy with the writing I do for my day job (which is technical), and I haven't had much time to write about what's been going on music-wise. But I have a moment or two of down time, so I thought I'd so a little newsy "here's what's up" post.

1. Recording
   Not much to report. Since we had to cancel a session before the holidays, everyone's been too busy to schedule anything. My next big plan is to get the whole trio together with the producer and record "She Walked Away" (which, after all, is the main track for the EP), but that takes more coordinating than just me taking a couple hours off. We'll try to get that together by mid-February at the latest.
   


2. Songwriting
   I have been writing a lot of songs, or at least parts of songs. It's like a faucet I can't turn off: they just keep coming. Most of the ideas I have end up on the dust heap, or at best end up as half a song in my journal, something I'll look at later when I have time and see if there's enough there to develop. But I have written or rewritten a few complete songs that I'm happy with, so I keep tinkering with the live set list and re-conceiving the layout of the EP. Good thing we're behind on recording, I guess.



3. Shows
   Redlight Cafe, February 2nd. I'm really excited about this show: Years ago, when my band was "Adam's Cat," we played the Redlight all the time. It's still run by the same proprietor, and it's still a great music venue. If you're in Atlanta, come a little early (we start at 8:00) and let's have a great time!



4. New Site
   I was so tickled by the redesign here, I updated MediumLoud to more or less match. It's really a thinly-concealed blog, which makes it a bit easier for me to update and shifts the server load to Google. Hope you like it!
   



5. T-Shirts
   And finally, I've opened a T-Shirt Store over at Cafe Press just for the heck of it. The design is based on the poster I did for the Redlight show, and I just thought it was cool so I made a shirt from it. Of course, the advantage of CP is, I don't have to cough up any money up front for the shirts like I would with a screen printing shop. They use direct print technology, and it's really high-quality stuff -- not just a cheesy iron-on. Proceeds (such as they are) go to defray recording costs.
   

-Peace!

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.

She Walked Away: Confessional

In the current Paste, Jeff Leven writes, "There's a misconception about primarily acoustic 'singer/songwriter' music that bears correction; whenever there is relatively sparse instrumentation, clearly audible vocals and a vaguely confessional atmosphere . . . the assumption tends to be that we're getting a more intimate, emotional moment" (December 06/January 07, p. 92). He's on to something there.

When you write songs that sound confessional, people assume they are confessional. And if you're happily married with children and write songs about bad relationships or the ends of relationships, it can set people to worrying. So I find myself saying ridiculous things like, "by the way, the man in this song isn't me." Well, duh.

I often write either about or from the point of view of imagined characters, just as a fiction-writer would. At the same time, I suppose a song can be confessional without being literal. I think most of what I write is like that: I expose the things I think about, the filmstrips in my head, some bits of memory and maybe a little anxiety, but I don't necessarily narrate an episode from my life.

So "She Walked Away" feels very personal to me without having much to do with actual events. In thinking about how to write about writing the song, I've been re-reading lots of journal entries from almost a year ago, and it has reminded me that it started out as the coda to the song "Shudder" (of which I have a new recording; stream to follow this post). Both songs came out of imagery from a pretty bad poem I'd written years earlier in college that started, "She turned and walked away and left him standing there with a taste in his mouth; / A thought of cool falling. . . . " Pretty soon, I had more material for the coda than I had for the rest of the song, so I decided to start over and let it be its own song.

But here's something else I had forgotten: my idea for "She Walked Away" was that it would be about the end of a trivial relationship, something that wouldn't have much of a lasting impact on the people involved. The early versions of the song try to convey this notion, that they'll just walk away and that'll be it. I was thinking about a Billy Bragg song that ends, "Then one day it happened: she cut her hair, and I quit loving her." But at some point, I was listening to another song, Paul Simon's "Graceland," and a line in that song transformed completely the way I thought and felt about "She Walked Away." Next time, I'll write about the influence of those two songs, what I borrowed from each, and how I got from there to here. And what the original title of the song was.

Here's Shudder:

Technorati Tags: music, songwriting, relationships, billy bragg, paul simon, blogs

She Walked Away

While we're working on the "She Walked Away" EP, a friend suggested I do some posts about how I came to write that song and discuss the lyrics in some depth. I admit, I have some reservations about that, but I do think it's a good idea. So I'll get started by posting the lyrics as they stand right now (I keep tinkering, so these are a bit different from the current recordings).

She turned and walked away
And left him standing there
With a taste in his mouth.
A little sweet, a trace of lime --
Once so familiar, a bit strange this time,
A little strange this time.
A thought of coolness falling,
Of his fingers, of her hair;
Of something fragile missing, he can tell it isn't there.

What can he say? How should he feel?
She walked away; he knows it's not real.

He feels a thread grow weaker;
A shadow falls between.
He lifts his eyes to see what happened,
But above there's only sky, just a hint of lead;
Just the dawning thought that longing can turn to dread.

What can he say? How should he feel?
She walked away; he knows it's not real.

Maybe they'll both feel the damage.
Maybe they'll be blown apart.
Maybe he'll feel so transparent,
Like the world can see his heart.

She turned and walked away
And as she seems to fade
He can feel himself forgetting
The museum, the parking lot
The jeans she liked to wear
The coolness falling through his fingers tangled in her hair.

What can he say? How should he feel?
She walked away; he hopes it's not real.

What can he say? What should he do?
She walked away; She walked away? He'll walk away too.