Storm Notes

Here I was just last week writing about how beautiful the weather was, and then we spent the weekend crammed into a hallway with a bunch of pillows hoping our tiny house wouldn't be crushed. OK, not exactly, but our metro area had some mighty nasty weather this past weekend, and we were all caught a bit off guard.

Friday evening we had a little league baseball game, our first of the season (I'm the coach; my oldest son is on the team). The big discussion of the day was whether the rain would let up in time for us to play the game at 6:00. The clouds broke, the sun came out, and we played ball. We won 10 to 3, and the kids played really well. So the family came home in a good mood. Muddy cleats on the porch, showers, time for bed, the usual.

We put the kids to bed as the first major storm lumbered past us a few miles to the south. Shelle stayed with them in their room while I watched the weather both on TV and out the window. Reports were coming in of damage downtown and along an eastward corridor that kept looking like it should include us, but as I watched out the bedroom window, our big, drought-damaged trees barely waved.

Later, when Shelle came to bed, we continued to watch the shocking scenes of old buildings brought down by wind and sign and lamp posts twisted and torn, cars and trucks tossed and rolled down the highway like dice. We thought about our basement -- wet, low-ceilinged, probably ruled by some rodent monarch from a Stephen King story -- and wondered if the front hall wouldn't be safer after all.

We finally turned off the TV and went to sleep, but sometime near morning we were awakened by a horrible bang, loud as a shotgun blast. We both sat up in bed, and I realized in a moment the power was out. It had been raining hard but now there was a sudden, eerie silence. And then distant at first, a sound of wind, trees waving and the slight cracking of limbs. Gradually we were aware of a sound you hear about all your life: a steady droning, growing slowly in both volume and pitch. A sound like a freight train. There was almost no time -- mere seconds -- to react. I jumped out of bed and ran to the door to look outside, hoping for some visual confirmation I guess. The floor began shaking slightly, along with the pictures on the wall next to me. But looking out the window, I saw relative calm, not the torrid swirl of trees and brush I expected. Shelle was already getting up to get the kids when we heard a new sound, shocking, piercing, comforting: a train whistle. It was just the CSX, which comes through several times a night, and which we hardly notice any more.

We did actually spend Saturday afternoon under a tornado warning and crammed into the hallway. After Friday night, no one was taking chances, and the kids were all pretty scared. We're used to Spring storms around here, but I don't ever remember a storm where so many big, ostensibly strong structures were damaged by the wind alone. Usually we get a lot of trees knocked on top of things and low, weak structures blown apart. But this wind pulled bricks off of buildings and bent metal reinforcements. That's some serious shit right there.

WFH

I work from home as much as I can. My wife and friends like to tease me by putting quotes around the word working with their fingers -- "oh, he's working from home." We all know that's a joke. If I were in the office I'd be so resentful I'd spend the whole time blogging like everyone else does!

But today I thought I'd take a break from writing about abstruse data center technology to mention a little bit about how freakin' awesome it is to be working from home. See, yesterday I went to the office, and after just under an hour in traffic, I spent the entire day in mind-numbing meetings. I had one 20 minute break, during which I found a colleague who happened to have his classical guitar with him at work, and I played for about 10 minutes just so I wouldn't pull my hair out. I even ate my lunch during a meeting. Then it was an hour in traffic back home in time to work some more, then choir practice and supper on the run, and up late working last night. So this morning, I have a great appreciation for the fact that I spent most of the morning working in bed and listening to BBC radio 4 over the Internet. Then I got up and ate these little left over cakes I found in the fridge. Yum! Really sugary, and good with coffee.

It's sunny and warm outside; upper-sixties. The fringe flowers are in riotous bloom. Brown thrashers, cardinals, and a couple of different types of woodpecker are flitting through the woods in our back yard. I stood barefoot on the patio and finished my coffee this morning.

Working at the dining room table, I saw one of our local Cooper's hawks emerge from the periwinkles in the deep part of the back yard with a mouse in his talons. He's as big as a cat, and sitting on a low limb in the back yard, right by the kids' play set, he was the king of everything. Then the other male, smaller by about a third, swooped down and sat about 20 feet away, screaming. The larger male, annoyed, took off in a great swoop and flutter, flying toward the house and lumbering for altitude. The smaller male went after, and I took to the patio to watch. The females were high up over the street, and I saw all four hawks circling and screaming, for all the world like they were oblivious to the interstate just two blocks to the East.

After yesterday's misery, I need a little time to reflect: it could be worse. I could have to spend every day like that.

Billy Bragg

The first Billy Bragg song I ever heard was "Levi Stubbs' Tears." I was a brand new freshman in college and Talking to the Tax Man About Poetry had just come out. A guy on my hall named Jay heard me playing Bob Marley on my Sigma acoustic, and he invited me down to his room to listen to records. I was a little scared: Jay was a junior, and he was imposing. A giant of a man, with shocking blue eyes and thick dark hair swinging across his face. Faded black combat boots and a cheap plaid shirt like a tent. When he appeared in my doorway at 10:00 in the morning with a coffee pot full of water and a pack of cigarettes, I thought I might be in for some hazing, not genuine friendliness.

I left my guitar behind and we went down to his room on the other side of the pay phone and bathrooms. Right away I noticed a very big, very nice stereo with an actual turntable instead of a CD player. Jay pulled out a red and white 12" record with a picture of a well-dressed Levi Stubbs on the cover and BILLY BRAGG in block letters. "You gotta hear this," he said. Before even telling me his name, I think.

It was weird, really, because most of the guys on the hall wanted to hear me play, and they treated me almost deferentially. I would play stuff they expected like The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd and "Magaritaville," and then I'd hip them to some deep Who or Pink Floyd cuts and some Kinks, Clash, U2, REM, Cure, and other things I considered edgy and tough. I reckon I was pretty snotty, playing and singing my simplistic versions of the things I wanted people to hear. But I was regarded as sort of the music expert on my end of the hall, and no one ever really pushed my boundaries. Jay knew from the get-go he was going to open my eyes rather than the other way around.

Billy Bragg's unadorned electric guitar and brilliant songwriting -- along with his crazy cockney voice -- were unlike anything I'd heard before. It was a bit like the sea change I'd experienced a couple of years earlier when someone put The B-52s debut record in my hands, the way that had revised the way I heard pop music. But this was something different again. There was something punk about the record, but it was like singer/songwriter punk. This had an intimacy and a sparseness to it that was more arresting in its way than all the noisy swagger of "God Save the Queen" (which, by the way, Jay and I would also listen to that morning).

The flip side of "Levi Stubbs' Tears" included the amazing "Walk Away Renee," a starkly funny poem about a romance gone wrong spoken over a guitar version of the old Left Banke song. The imagery of that track has never left me. Jay also had the Talking With the Taxman LP, and we listened to the whole thing. He turned out to be the kind of guy who would suddenly throw his head back with laughter, then jump up and lift the needle -- "Did you hear that line? 'A man could spend a lot of time wondering what was on Jack Ruby's mind'! Jesus, that's great." And then he would move the needle back and listen again.

Jay never did much like to listen to me play my guitar and sing, though we would sometimes cut class together and sit in Rose Hill cemetery to drink beer and smoke while I played. In fact, whenever I tried to play a song for him I had written, he would just laugh enigmatically, but not in the "move the needle back" kind of way. Later he moved into a house and got so heavy into LSD that when I'd go over to listen to records, he'd maybe put the Sex Pistols on one turntable and Hank Williams on another and mix the two into an unlistenable cacophony, turning it up loud and laughing over at me in that "isn't this great?" kind of way. I'd try to laugh along, but I was way too much of a square to really find this funny. I always suspected he was punishing me for not wanting to get high with him.

When Jay and I were friends, I looked up to him a great deal. He introduced me to a lot of music and ended up changing the way I played guitar and sang. When I got a band going, it wasn't a laid back, strummy, folk rock affair. I fronted it with an angry, unadorned Stratocaster; and although we covered a lot of standard "college band" songs, I stripped them back to an essential few chords and played them fast, snarling out improvised lyrics in a way I thought would make Jay howl with laughter and want to move the needle back. But he never came out to hear us play.

As for Billy Bragg, he turned 50 last year and he's still making great music. He's always been known for his Workers First "this machine kills fascists" kind of Socialism. And I love some of his big political songs like "Help Save the Youth of America" and "There's Power in a Union" and "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward." I also have to admit that some of his political songs just suck, lacking the beauty and nuance he's capable of. What I learned from Billy Bragg most of all -- the thing that really stuck with me -- is how the personal is often the most political. His very best songs are, like "Levi Stubbs' Tears," songs about individuals trying to work out the meaning of very personal hurts, people trying to sort out the messes of their lives. We may be fighting an uphill battle trying to straighten out big-picture politics as long as we haven't got a clue about the little pictures in our little worlds.

Here's a very young Billy Bragg playing "Levi Stubbs' Tears":

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

Thanks!

We had a really nice turnout for Saturday night's Java Monkey show, and it might just have been one of our best shows ever. At the expense of getting all left field on you, it was like we were lifted up out of ourselves by the audience's energy. It's something I don't really know how to describe; you just have to feel it. But if you could feel that all the time you'd just about get lost in it.

We did a lot of new songs, but we also did some old ones. And we did several traditionals, like "Moonshiner" and "A Rovin' On a Winters Night." I did Falling, which I've written about badly here. And I played a Townes Van Zandt song, since he's been so much on my mind lately. Of course we did the "Waves" and "She Walked Away" like we always do. One song that Shelle and I were particularly pleased with was "101 Degrees," so here's a new demo of that song, as recorded a couple of weeks ago:

101 Degrees

Enjoy!

Without a Trace

After several postponed studio dates, we finally got one we could keep on Saturday, Feb. 9. Under the expert guidance of our producer, Ryan Williams of JimmyEther.com, Shelle and I recorded seven songs in a fairly relaxed one-day session. We just stood in front of microphones and performed much like we would on stage, except the equipment was better and we could always back up and try again when we made a mistake!

Many of the songs we recorded were new, including "Without a Trace." Shelle had never sung it with me and I'd not performed it until the night before at an ad hoc Java Monkey show where I filled in for a friend. I wrote the song some weeks ago while I was noodling around on the guitar with the TV on. I needed some words to proof-out the melody, and there was a crime show on called "Without a Trace"; that title happened to fit the syllable count just right. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had what I thought was a decent little song.

That song turned out to be one of the pleasant surprises of the recording session. We were about to give it up after a couple of mediocre takes, but Ryan said, "I really have a feeling about this. If you're willing to give it one more take, I think you guys are going to nail it." Well, you can be the judge of whether we "nailed" it. But in this quick session mix, I feel the seeds of a better song than the one I dashed off distractedly while watching TV.

Download it here: Without a Trace

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.

In the Studio

Just a quick note: Shelle and I will be recording with producer Jimmy Ether on 12/26. It was just over a year year ago when I recorded six tracks with Jimmy (as I wrote about here), expecting the cruise right through a series of demos and an EP. Since then, he's built a new studio and we've cooled our heels, focusing more on writing and performing than on recording. With this year's sessions, though, we expect to complete the work we started last December and (we hope) lay the groundwork for an LP in 2008. So send us happy holiday recording vibes, if you think of it!

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

Library Show

The Patrick Bryant Trio played at the Decatur Library last night, and from where I stood, it was a great show. Not that our performance was just sublimely beautiful or anything, but the venue was nice and the audience was fantastic, and there was just a happy confluence of factors that made everything feel "right." In fact, on our side, there were some goofy gaffs, such as me completely blowing the lyrics to a song I wrote over 15 years ago or my own cell phone ringing loudly in the middle of the quietest moment of "Moonshiner," but it was the kind of audience that would let us joke through that kind of thing and move on without much embarrassment.

There were a couple of high spots for me in this show. "Moonshiner," had it not been for the ringing phone, felt very nice. There's something haunting about Shelle's harmony on that song, the way her pure voice contrasts with the desperation of the speaker, who's saying "when the bottle gets empty, [life] ain't worth a damn." Last night we had her microphone good and loud so she could sing with the quiet nuance she needs and still be heard. It gave me chills. Also, I thought our "She Walked Away" was the very best we've performed it. I wish I'd had tape rolling, because I'd like to remember the exact pacing: somehow we just hit the right groove, and it felt great.

For me, the most important moment was debuting a new song: "Stay Close to Me." I was unusually nervous about playing it, for some reason. Maybe because it's the first song of significance (to me) I've written in a long time. It's a lot easier to perform songs that are laid back or tongue-in-cheek or ironic. But this one tries to capture something like straightforward emotion, and the only way to perform it is all out, and I felt like if it flopped, I'd feel like I was pretty much standing there naked. But it was received warmly, I thought, and I was relieved and immensely grateful.

If you were there, thanks!

Here's what we played:

Louis Collins
I Didn't Feel
Novocaine
101 Degrees
Pain Rhymes So Good
Moonshiner
A 'Rovin On a Winter's Night
Falling
Fish Hook
Stay Close to Me
NC2U
Waves
She Walked Away

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.

Update

Wow, long time no post! My real job (the one where I actually get paid for writing) has been mighty time-consuming of late, and Spring little-league is upon us, with all that that implies.

Anyway, thought I'd write up a quickie about what little bit we've got going on musically. I'm still trying to squeeze in another date with Jimmy E. to finish up the EP. It's all on me, basically; he's usually Delta -- ready when we are. Performance-wise, Blake Guthrie invited me to join him at 4:00 on Sunday, March 18th at Aurora Coffee in L5P (next to Criminal Records) for an afternoon songwriters gig. I've done a similar show he hosted at Java Monkey, and it was great, so I can't wait.

Also, the big Northwoods Spring Carnival is coming up. This is a fundraiser for my kids' Montessori school, and it's become traditional for me to put together a band to play in the parking lot. It's also traditional for me to wait until the last minute and then throw it together badly! So I'm right on track with that. Matt's already on board to play bass (of course), so I'll probably just scare up a drummer and do it as a three-piece. It's huge fun because we play a lot of covers, which I rarely do at my shows.

Finally, I have a couple of house shows brewing, and I'm talking to Bill at the Redlight about another show there either in April or May, so of course I'll announce on my events page when any of that comes to fruition.

Meantime, watch here for some new downloads. When I get the time, I'll post some more advanced material from the EP, just to prove I'm not making it all up!

Peace,
Patrick

Redlight Report

A week ago tonight "The Patrick Bryant Trio" played at Atlanta's Redlight Cafe, and although I should pretend like it was nothing special -- just another in a long line of successful gigs, I gotta say: it was extraordinary. Our playing was probably no better than usual (though I hope no worse), and frankly, there were reasons to be annoyed, like the freezing temperatures in the venue and the free-floating time slot. But what made the show stand out so much was first the really excellent and professionally mixed sound system, and most importantly, the amazing audience.

I was excited about this show from the get-go for nostalgic reasons. Over a decade ago, we used to play the Redlight about once a month or so as "Adam's Cat," and even before that as "The Kilngods." So I worked hard to let as many people as possible know about this show. You might even say I was a bit aggressive, cornering people one-on-one or in small groups and inviting them to the show, making a general nuisance of myself until I wore down their resistance. But people did not disappoint me! Not only did those faithful friends who often come out to hear us turn up, but folks from work and church and old jobs; people that I haven't seen in years and people I've only just met heard about the show and came out on a freezing cold night and sat in a cold venue and listened to us play a 90 minute set of songs most of them had never heard.

If you've not been on the other side of the monitors, you may not understand what an amazing gift it is to have your own material listened to and appreciated. Over the years, I've learned that an audience has done its job by showing up and paying the cover charge. Once you take the stage, it's all up to you; they're under no great obligation to like you or listen to you or even be particularly quiet. It can be a terrifying thing to stand there and play song after song that you've written and that your audience doesn't know. Certainly you don't risk a barrage of rotten vegetables; it's something much worse you have to fear: their indifference. I've been there before, and it turns your guts to ice water. So when I say I appreciate not just the size and diversity but also the warmth and attention of Friday night's audience, you will understand that I'm not offering a perfunctory "thanks y'all." I'm talking about something fundamental to why I do this in the first place. I'm talking about why music matters to me, why I write and perform songs, why I care.

Here are some pics from the show:

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!

New Design

As you will have noticed, I bowed to the blandishments of new blogger layout tools, the complaints of a number of folks that they can't see the text on my blog very well, and my own desire to "turn on the lights." As part of the re-design, I changed the URL (it's a long story, but it amounts to making it easier for me to deal with and putting most of the load back on Google). So, on the off chance that you've linked to the old URL, please update to http://blog.mediumloud.com

Lemme know how you like it!

Update: I'm redesigning my main page too: MediumLoud.com It also uses blogger now (which means there's a little delay as it re-directs. Also, I'm updating this to get this back at the top of the feed because apparently I edited an old post and whacked the sort order. Grr.

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.

Had a Post . . .

Big and strong /
Turned around and found my blog post gone.

(Sung to the tune of Jane's Addiction's "Had a Dad," if you didn't pick up the reference).

I wrote a very long, very personal installment in the "She Walked Away" series, but it fell through the crack between the bed and the wall. Or more precisely, it fell through the crack made by the upgrade to the new version of Blogger and its interaction with my post editing software. So I'm bummed, and I can't quite face trying to reconstruct it yet. So forgive me for being so tardy in my posting. It's not for want of caring about you, dear reader.

While I'm rambling, I might as well mention: I thinking I'm going to reinstate my old blog, "I Shudder to Think" to write about general music and songwriting things -- stuff not directly related to this recording project. I wrote a new song this week called "Voices" (which I'll probably play Wednesday at Java Monkey), so maybe I'll write something about that over there. We'll see. blah blah blah. I have a headache. Guess I should go back to work.


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