Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Creative

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Okay, so, you can call it the after-effects of the spectacular Buffy Musical from this weekend which swept Garbage, Erin McKeown, DeathCab for Cutie, Rufus Wainwright, and Leona Naess right out of my musical rotation as soon as i finished downloading it … but i want to write a musical.

Hey, stop laughing. Just stick with me for a minute.

For my Creative Writing class i wrote this awfully belabored story, and i could have passed it off as excellent work to any other teacher, but my instructor leveled her gaze right at me and said “you didn’t like that assignment too much, huh?” So, after much negotiation we decided that i would write another short story and hand in a cd of a few songs to make up for some of my least favourite poetry assignments, and that my grade would somehow be triangulated from the both of them. Mind you, i’m getting an A in the class either way, but both of us agreed i should at least try to get some criticism out of the class for my effort, and i can’t really do that with a story i’m not feeling at all. So, once more with feeling…


Meanwhile, we have the new songs. Some of them are quite nice and i like them, but this year i’ve found a lot of them work just as much as stories as they do pop songs. For example, there’s the inverted pair of “Over You” and “Excuse,” the latter of which details a sexual escapade that might not have been the best idea in the world and the former pretty much saying that the narrator can’t get said escapade out of his head. While working out the puzzle of what songs are heading for my next demo earlier i found myself with a heap of these narrative songs, with an entire handful of them that are as good as those two but that i wouldn’t leave standing alone in the middle of an album.

And that’s when it hit me… i should turn in a one act musical to my Creative Writing class… or, at the very least, a story with narration via song. Yes, it sounds insane, especially since i typically hate musicals and writing drama, but it makes some sort of crazy sense in this post-Buffy world. So… we’ll see. (Nevermind that i just wrote the synopsis and the main character’s theme, we’ll see. Honestly. I’m not going to spend all night doing this instead of studying to retain my perfect score in communications).

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7070555/

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So, we’ve established how pretty much everyone i know has heard “Under My Skin,” right? And, why not? It’s cute, it bops, it’s got some background vocals, and i’m singing it like i mean it (because i do). Tonight as i took a quick scroll through my lyrics folder i had to remind myself that there was life before “Under My Skin,” and that life included writing and singing and playing guitar just as much as this one does. There is one song more representative of that than any other, and that is “Touch.”


Life was on a smaller scale when it came to my guitar Senior Year… writing a good song sometimes meant that three or four people might hear it ringing out against the tile of the basement hallway, and “Touch” was my relative success. With it’s nonexistent nonsense lyrics that were practically ad-libbed every time and it’s chiming verses that spun out to the simplest of choruses, “Touch” was just about the utmost of what i could offer, and hardly anyone knew about it. Three years ago this week a mere handful of people had heard it, and two years ago the number had only improved by another couple handfuls. And, now, this once-stalwart of my collection is buried under dozens of songs that i like more with little hope of anyone ever really getting to appreciate it. My life is weird that way… hits rise and fall in my own mind. The chances of “Under My Skin” making a repeat appearance on my next demo recording are slim to none, which means a year or two from now even it’s listening public of over a hundred people will (hopefully) pale in comparison to what songs like “Excuse” or “Tangling” will know.

Radiohead mostly stopped playing “Creep” after everyone screamed for it at every show, and at last month’s Ani DiFranco concert the oldest song she played was from her fifth album. Point being, not even fame necessarily cures the case of lost songs because they are either “Under My Skin” or “Touch” — you’re sick of them, or have too many other songs crowding them out.

And, so, i am almost afraid to write down what i feel, because it will have a life so much shorter than mine despite my attempts to immortalize it. I sang “Touch” tonight because it had somehow slipped through the cracks of Trio for over a year despite its only being two years old last fall. I wonder if it’ll ever appear again…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7053722/

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My secrets are a set of Russian Dolls that i closely guard; the biggest of the dolls, the exterior one, is a secret in name only. She is a secret i willingly share. If you were to lift her away there is a slightly more secret doll underneath that less people have seen, and she is a more decorated secret that is only smaller through having been kept enclosed for so long; she has shrunk down onto herself, almost distilled down. Lifting her away reveals yet another treasured secret, and so on and so forth. Some of those larger dolls are ones that i just idly pass by to get to the smaller ones, and no one has ever learned to recognize them along the way. Some of the smaller ones i don’t even know the look of anymore — just where they fit into the puzzle. And then, somewhere in the middle of the entire mess, there is one secret so distilled unto itself that it is like a single drop of the purest alcohol in the world: enough to knock me off of my feet.


I let Lindsay have one of those inbetween Dolls last night… one that wasn’t so small but that i had totally forgotten the look of. She smiled a tiny smile as i handed it to her, and spread her fingers over the polished secret surface while i sang the song i had written for it, and when i was done she handed it back to me and asked why i kept such a pretty one hidden away, and i think i said that “i don’t even remember what it feels like anymore; i like that i’ve forgotten. i couldn’t feel this every time i play that song… it’s not the most hidden away, but i usually just skip past it and head towards the smaller ones.”


It is put away now, but i remember it’s shiny features and its beaded eyes and the ribbons in its hair… all things i had forgotten. And it’s song is still ringing in my ears, but i’m afraid if i play it again i might shatter everything entirely.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7016140/

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Lindsay and I sat on the couch last night and revealed things to each other. Lindsay was sick and convinced that the cure was sitting down for long periods of time and having some wine (she’s almost Italian, i know), and i was feeling about to be sick and was convinced that the preemptive cure was lots of vanilla ice-cream and lounging in sexy-but-comfortable clothes. I don’t think either of us was correct in our convictions, because this morning we both appear to be sick, but somewhere along the way we both decided that the television was rotting our brains, and so we shared.


Lindsay is a Digital Media major and total artistic genius. She sings, she draws, she designs, she photographs, she writes, she composes. She brought out three different versions of her creativity in physical form for me to see… an allegory, a play, and a picture-book. And, after having sat there watching her share things to me that she treasured so carefully none were crinkled or smudged, the only thing i could think to give back were songs.


I have songs that have never been crinkled or smudged… songs that i have left alone for so long that i stumble over the words and chords. So, i brought down my poetry book and gave Lindsay three songs, two of which i don’t ever really give… one of which no one has ever really heard before in real life (it was Trio-ed, once). And, i told her the story; my songs are pretty 3-minute tonal pictures without a smudge on them, but saying what it stood for turning some silly little song into something more important than i ever could have intended. Who knew that some silly emotion i felt Senior year of highschool could almost bring me to tears three years later? And who knew that such intentionally silly little words would come off so meaningful when prefaced by an explanation that had never seen the light of day before?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7015994/