my music
Blogathon: 25/24 – Under My Skin
I don’t know when i stopped just writing songs as a hobby and started occasionally referring to myself as a singer-songwriter. How can i really draw a line there? How does someone go from doodling to being an artist? I doodled for a long time, writing good songs that never left my own bedroom – akin to sketches in the margins of a notebook. Now i take myself seriously, constantly revising and re-recording each song until i feel as though it has reached its end point – and even then occasionally pulling it off the shelf to be aired.
I cannot pinpoint the day that i began to take myself serious enough to say so out loud, but i can promise you it had to do with my next song. Earlier this evening i told someone via IM that practicing songs was like sanding down a chunk of wood until it becomes a perfectly smooth sphere, and that i only had one or two songs out of over a hundred that had reached that point. This song, if no other, has gone there… to the point where i can get lost in the nuances of one silly little riff and then forget the lyrics entirely. I have played it so many times, in so many different ways, that it’s as if i have come back around to it being new again and i am now discovering it for the first time.
It takes a big song to fill that void, and it didn’t start out big. It still isn’t, actually: just three chords, three verses, and what was once just some fortuitous ad-libbing. When i sing it, i feel famous. It makes me sweat because i move to it underneath my guitar as my fingers dance back and forth across the riffs i have unearthed, there shape and arrangement changing on every beat. It makes me frustrated when it will not sound out correctly, and it makes me glow when i change something about it only to make it more interesting to perform.
It’s late, and a lot of bloggers are getting a little weepy, but this is how i always feel about song 25/24. Earlier tonight i tried my best to open up a new side of it for you to see, and i encourage you to click through to older audio of it through its lyrics file so that you can hear the differences i am talking about. I’m under no illusion that, as a result, you will take me any more seriously as a musician. But, maybe you’ll just be able to understand how i can feel like this about something so simple that anyone who has performed on it has irrevocably altered.
Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, and goodnight.
Songs come from nuggets, moments, tiny subdivisions of time. Some of my favorite songs were written about a single moment of inebriation or a single flurry of kisses. “What It Is” was written based on a single ten minute argument. Tangling was based on a feeling in the pit of my stomach as someone talked right past me. I doubt that she meant to, and it was only for a moment, but in that moment my perspective of the conversation flattened down just to the relationship between the two of us, and then expanded to make that relationship out to be more important than it ever really was. But all it took was that one second of my stomach twisting itself into knots, and i had a song.
Until You Awake was the last song of the Blogathon last year. For the entire week i had been stuck for something excellent to close with, and as i became more and more involved with reading Mollie the song starting coming to me, slowly but surely. I remember all of the stages: sitting on my bedroom floor, furiously scribbling down the words … on the couch with Gina, desperately trying to get the picking pattern right … in front of my computer, getting it right on the first take.
In the year between then and now a lot has happed to change everyone in the world, and a lot has happened to me individually. That song stuck through, though, and every time i play it for someone new i get to tell the story about last year’s blogathon and how i really felt as though i was having a concrete effect on something. And on someone. In a way i think it’s both the most personal and the most serious song i’ve ever written.
I hope you enjoy it. Thank you, Mollie.