my music
I have a slim gray book with wide college ruled pages that serves as my lyric book; most of the time i know how to sing what i intend to play, but on some occasions it’s nice to know i have a tidy volume to back up my occasionally unsure memory. Heading into Freshman year i decided that my old, red, spiral-ruled book was due to be retired; i had aptly filled the entire front section of it just as classes began, and i wanted a set of fresh pages to start all of my new emotions in. I literally put my creative impulses on hold for two months while i shopped for the perfect vehicle for my words, endlessly reiterating a practice set of “Bridge,” “Other Plans,” All That’s True,” and “Deadweight” while i held out for a new place to write. Finally, on a trip to South Street, i found the book. It stayed empty for a few weeks… i had this phobia that if i started it off with something terrible that it would always be affected by what dreadful thing i set down on that first blank page. So, i kept holding out.
It was a poorly constructed dam on my feelings, and eventually they burst out onto the margins of my anthropology notes — hardly heeding my attempts to herd them in the direction of my empty gray book. Each snippet just delayed my marking it up even more, because they were just that; snippets — nothing up to snuff. Ironically, it all changed the day that i skipped Anthropology, at the urging of Megan, who was skipping out on the 9am class we both had preceding it. Somewhere in the routine of talking to her and skipping class i managed to lock myself out of my room for a couple of hours with only my bookbag to keep me company, and i wound up in our lounge staring out into a gray and rainy day. That past weekend i had been to my first college party, and i had drank my first drink and smoked for the first time, and i had this endless swirl of feelings in my stomach … feelings just starting to develop about Laurel, feelings about what i had done, and feelings about what was to come.
I intended to have my slim book with me, but life is ironic; i gave birth to my first set of college lyrics sloppily on the backside of Anthropology notes, uneven and ugly. It didn’t seem like very much of a song, by my standards, but it felt like it should go into the book — it didn’t mean very much if i just read what it had to say, but it felt just like i felt.
Eventually Kenny returned from his class and let me into the room, and i promptly retrieved the book, my key, and my Ashland guitar. He was headed down into a nap, and so i headed back into the lounge. A capo here, a string retuned there, and suddenly it happened.
The book is plenty different now. By last fall i had already become too afraid to set any fresh thoughts directly into it for fear that they might besmirch the excellent average of quality material that i had established in my unprecedented streak of decent songwriting. I began to cheat — songs began on my computer, and if they were worth saving i would copy them into the book the next day. Soon i fell behind on my copying, and by last Christmas i had a sheath of songs stuck into the back of the book when i boarded my plane for Florida, hoping to get it all caught up to me.
Now the book and i work in shifts… sometimes there are a few consecutive songs that were obviously scrawled into it as quickly as i could think up lyrics for them, and then there are carefully printed ones that have been sung scores of times before i put them into penciled words. There is a difference, though, as i found in rereading it today. The bits from Freshmen year were… different. Frank. Reactionary. Unedited. Even the quality songs that i still play appeared in virginal and unretouched version that betray my original intentions for them. And, then there are things i don’t remember writing… my accounts of my misguided cancer scare, seeing Anastasia over Christmas break, and auditioning for Hair. Things that would never make it past the most basic of neurons let alone down to my fingers and out into the book.
In fact, my life hardly ever makes it into the book anymore… oddly enough, it stopped doing that at nearly the same time i started doing this. Which makes me wonder… where is my life going to go after i get tired of copying it down into here long after it’s already happened? Makes me wonder…
Trio: Season 2, #6
Season 2’s Trio #6 came from an unexpected place; i meant to do some sort of fun event with my newly reclaimed 1960 electric hollow-bodied guitar this weekend but had the bad fortune of losing a solid half of my upper vocal register to the various parties i attended. Tonight i sat down to Trio a new trio of songs and found myself utterly disconnected from all three of them… they were in the wrong range, not the right sort of aggression, and not really what i was feeling. And, so, 4 days of careful planning got the flush as i dropped a D and raised a C, and suddenly i found myself smack in the middle of an unusual fifteen minutes.
I had a similar experience with Trio #5 last fall, where i was too stuck to do anything but meander my way through a familiar group of songs. The difference was that here i was actually reinventing with force rather than meandering aimlessly, and having fun in the process. “Lost” was awarded an extra refrain so it could mold itself to the year and a half since i wrote it, and ends in a mock thrash; “Crashing” akin to its beginnings on my bedroom floor, emerging with the most spectacular ad-lib section i’ve ever mustered (short of when it unexpectedly broke into “Say My Name” last summer); “Under My Skin” was classically playful and free — i even venture into a superbly flat falsetto at the close of the song. Electricity and fun are somewhat unusual feelings for me, but tonight they clicked.
Very unusual. Especially the electricity. Give this a listen… what sounds different to you?
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).
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…