Hair is cute. More importantly, a great example of the sorts of faces i make when not preening for a self pic.
Personal
Candy Says
Cool moment of personal achievement:
Listening to random underplayed songs at work I thought I was listening to a heretofore unheard live track of one of my favorite songs, but it was actually me singing it! I didn’t even realize until I picked up my iPod and saw my face on the album cover.
Alright, alright, if you insist: It was Candy Says, from Blogathon 2003. A little buzzy at full volume, but played quietly on work speakers it’s perfect.
Richard
My headache began a few days ago as a pair of too-wide yawns. The first flexed the right side of my jaw a little too far, and with the second there was a slightly audible crackle of bones being uncooperative. “Stop trying to unhinge your Jaw,” Elise said, “you don’t have to eat those rabbits all in one piece.”
Yes, my girlfriend is amusing.
The ache persisted for a few days, and by last night it was on the move – the pain slithered in to my mouth, up to my temple, and down the side of my neck. The ache became the headache, which in turn became one of the top three worst headaches of my life. (Another is here).
The headache is so persistent and distinct that I feel as though it is some separate entity – a symbiote – inflicting its will on me. It is like Spidey’s black suit, attached to me at the jaw, trying to envelop my entire head so that it can control my brain.
For sanity’s sake, I have named it. Meet my headache, Richard. You can call it Rick for short.
This is an important distinction for me: I am not my pain, and visa versa. I refuse to walk into work defined by a headache, or anything else, for that matter. On the outside I am committed to being my same vivid self, no matter the interior conditions.
(I would compare this to stepping onto the stage, but that analogy has the negative connotation attached to it from the time I tried to sublimate my 103 fever for a dress rehearsal but wound up with Bronchitis and Pneumonia. Because, you see, a fever is not just a symptom, it’s a condition, and you are your conditions.)
I’ve been surrounded by lots of headache sufferers in my life – a certain ex convinced it could be a brain tumor, and two former bosses whose headaches increased sensitivity to light and destroyed appetites.
My thinking on the matter is that pain is just a perception – just another sense. And, in the same way you can tune out a droning noise or adapt to a familiar smell, you can work your perception around pain. Certainly, some pain is of a source and magnitude much too high to ignore; after all, you can’t exactly tune out a jackhammer.
Richard will not be reaching jackhammer significance in my life. Because, unless some part of my is cracked or broken or abcessed, Rick is just an illusion of my perception. I can tune out Richard just like screening a call. He could just be an itch, or a tickle, or a gnat.
Richard has no magnitude because, there is no Richard. He’s just a yawn that got too wide. As easily as he interrupted my sleep and made me late for work he is banished back into the ether from whence he came.
Success to the successful… oh, nevermind.
Well, it took nine years, but i officially have learned my second guitar solo. I can even play it along with the record (with mild ad-lib).
Of course, now that it’s all learned i just watched a video of it being played and part of it is in a different position. Fucking Hal Leonard and their Authentic Transcriptions can kiss my authentic transcriptionist ass, i knew their tab was too easy to be true.
I swear, if i ever get popular enough to warrant a sheet music book it’s going to have full standard notation of all music and vocals, complete guitar tab, and piano arrangements for every song – all approved by me. I’ll arrange it all myself if i have to. You know, just like the Dresden Dolls book (which is amazing).
In and out on this same path that I followed for years
Lately I have been spending a lot of my free time perched in my chair, pouring over old poetry notebooks, tracking down lost songs.
Ever the archivist, when I built my first “artist” website back on Geocities I made it a point to unflinchingly catalog all of my songs – from the very first – noting the birth date of each one. That list eventually became a virtual discography that numbered each song sequentially running through the writing of “Under My Skin” during freshman year at Drexel.
Half a decade of intervening years has erased my memory of all but the “greatest hits” of those early songs. In some cases I can still recall a melody, or a few chords, but in others I’m surprised that I even wrote a song by that name. My longtime undercounting of my catalog at 140 songs was a result of this – fully sixty songs has been discarded or forgotten.
As I build my new MYSQL song database I have been slowly reconstructing and archiving those songs – their lyrics and chords, but also the stories behind them. In some cases its easy. A few days ago I unearthed one forgotten oldie from its original notebook, complete with lyrics, chord diagrams, and even some guitar tab. It held up remarkably well when i played it. Other songs are much more obscure – existing only as scraps of notebook paper – scribbled lyrics littered with strikeouts and arrows. Or, worse, just a single 8-bit recording, my tenative voice floating in from somewhere in the 90s to remind me I wasn’t always this loud.
Of course, even the most well preserved of these songs are still seven or eight years old, and my compositional abilities at seventeen are a strange match for my performance abilities at twenty-five. While some sound miraculously intact, others are fragments of some wholer emotion I couldn’t refine enough at the time.
On Tori Amos’s recent boxed set she reached back to the masters from Little Earthquakes to pluck a song – “Take Me With You” – that was only partially finished out of obscurity. Building from the original piano composition, she reconstructed the lyrics:
The truth is, there was a vocal on the 1990 take, and the lyrics to the chorus are the same. I’ve retained the chorus and parts of the bridge and used it as a skeleton. Then I worked around what was just humming in the verses. But the bridge was close to being there and the choruses were intact, so I haven’t changed a word. – Record Collector, Nov 2006
Tori’s idea is a seductive one – that of mining old material for new material, subtly updating a fragmented song to make it complete. Should I play the part of Tori to these unrefined tunes, shoring up the tentative framework of existing lyrics or layering in additional passing chords where once they were only implied? What if the identity of those songs is intrinsically linked to their naivite? Says Tori, “First of all you have to be able to think that you can almost channel yourself as you were then, and yet still be you now.” Is it worth it to interfere?
Just as alluring, there are two songs that seem to be entirely unfindable, even after pouring through every notebook, every folder of scraps. Interestingly, in both cases I remember exactly what the song was about. In one case I even remember the general shape and sound of the tune, and even the color of ink I wrote it with, but none of the specific lyrics or chords. If I were to reconstruct either of these song would they be something new, even though it uses the original idea as a touchtone? Are they better left lost?
I’m never sure why it’s so important to me to manage my catalog of songs so carefully, never letting one slip into obscurity. It reminds me of my childhood, how i would pour over the liner notes to every new cassette, memorizing credits, sourly disappointed if lyrics weren’t included. Even as I painstakingly transcribed lyrics from faded paper and chords from lo-fi recordings I find myself pausing to examine snippets of songs that were never finished enough to be included on the discography, wondering if they could be refurbished into something new and complete.
I suppose the correct answer is, “Yes, if it makes a good song.” But, I’m not really searching for good songs. I just want my catalog to be entirely performable, and listenable. If that requires some minor reconditioning, so be it. But, if I write in entire new verses by my 2006 self, can I rightfully call the song the same thing I did in 1998?