Well, summer’s almost over and I’m getting ready to leave the oft chilly early autumn in Massachusetts for the 2nd summer of October in Florida. It’s been a weird summer for me. I intended to read a lot, ride a lot and write lots of songs. But in fact, I read very little, rode only four or five times and spent almost three months finishing a song I started more than a year before (“Fairly Spectacular”.)
“Fairly Spectacular” ought to be my last song about my off-road excursion through the land of blunt-force trauma, but one never knows. Previously, the songs in this MVA genre were objective: Recognizable imagery, familiar surroundings, plausible and/or humorous events, predictable outcomes. But for this one, I wanted to convey the surrealism at the nexus of hypoxia, opioids, anemia, orthopedic surgery, thoracic surgery and a deeper fatigue than I had ever known. That’s a long way of saying that the listener should not expect the lyric to make literal sense; the discontinuities are not simply deliberate, but accurate to the best of my (affected) recollection. This is not a Bob Ross painting. It’s more René Magritte.
Funding being limited, I’m going to take a crack at this one at the Neo Bananacus studio where everybody knows my name and they all work for free. Look for that one around October or November.
As I mentioned, I spent three months (May through July) finishing “Fairly Spectacular”, but I actually wrote two other songs after that one.
“Hype-pocrisy” expresses my frustration and anger about growing up with hyper-masculine role models and how the morality they taught was different from the way they lived their lives. It took about 2 months from concept to completion. Look for that one a little later in the year.
I love writing songs more than almost anything else I have ever done and I don’t think about the quality of them so much as the crafting process itself. Like any aspiring songwriter, I have read a great deal about how my favorite (famous) singer-songwriters go about the writing process. I cannot say I’ve learned a great deal except for two main concepts: 1) their process varies and 2) so does mine.
Some songs take years to complete.
Some songs are never complete.
Some songs begin with a lyric. Some with a melody or chords.
Some are constructed piecemeal from divergent musical ideas and random scraps of imagery.
Sometimes they turn out not to be about what you thought they were about.
And sometimes…sometimes they flow through you as if you’re transcribing something that has already been written.
I have thus concluded that I am doing it correctly.
Which brings me to the third song “Happy (Fucking) Song.” This is an example of a song that was seemingly already there and I just wrote it down. It’s genesis goes something like this: “Honey, you know how I spent months on that song about being loopy in the hospital? I finally finished it and now I’m working on a new one about toxic masculinity.” Her reply was something along the lines of me needing to break out of the habit of dwelling on my personal trauma or ranting about what a shitshow American life is now. “Why don’t you write a fucking happy song for once?”
It was done in an hour.
I can’t wait to get back into the studio. Stay tuned.
