The Beatles, “Let It Be,” just came on the satellite radio here at Perk, the first chord timed with my first keystroke and determining the subject of this entry. Rob brings up some really cool things about music and performance that I think are forgotten sometimes when you become a professional musician, about how music affects you, speaks to you as a listener. And I think when it becomes your means of meager survival, sometimes you even forget what you’re really giving of yourself when you get up there on stage.
My mother hates “Let It Be,” not because she is not a fan of the song, but because for her it is so intimately entwined with the documentary that showed the bitterness building into what would eventually be the crumble of The Beatles. I dated a boy who could not listen to Concrete Blonde’s Bloodletting album (one of his favorites) for years because it was the soundtrack to a time in his life when he was getting drunk in mourning over a relationship. He was in said state when the lyric from “Joey” (“and if you’re somewhere drunk and passed out on the floor…”) came on, and it hit a little too close to home. His overwhelming negative reaction to the album was one of the things that made me pick it up secretly in an attempt to know him better, to be let in a little more into the mystery of all that came before me in his life.
The song you could not escape during one of my relationships was John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland,” which I kind of liked only because of that one part at the end of the song where he so earnestly just says, “Damn, baby.” I would always sing it in the car when we were together. My ex would later joke that he was so glad it had been that song out and not one he really liked, because he felt not the slightest guilt or frustration turning it off after we broke up, and sometimes he even smiled while he did it.
What’s fascinating about music is that it is such a multi-level experience. It can connect with us temporally as well as lyrically. Sometimes it’s just that our personal movie soundtrack was set to a certain tune at a certain time in our lives, and whether the contents applied or not, that song is now a part of that experience – A trigger as persuasive as the smell of fresh-cut grass or salt water or an old girlfriend’s special soap. And then again, a song written two decades before we were born can lay us low with a lyric that seems ripped specifically from our lives, or from every life that has ever been. Or without a single lyric, the mellow notes of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue can make you remember dancing in a candlelit room.
And the same songs can mean vastly different things to different people because of where, when and how you hear them. Those people on the late-night love song requests all sending out the same songs to different lovers for different reasons… I think that’s why you gotta give pop music credit sometimes … here is a medium that can apply uniquely and deeply to THAT many people over time. It might be the ONLY artform that can claim that complete, accessible and intimate an effect.
And then there are people who write and perform, who go on to appreciate a song for a million other reasons. We run our hands over the perfect joints of verses like appreciating a magnificent table built by another carpenter. Just because we know how to build doesn’t mean we can’t be constantly made to stand in awe of people who stopped merely building at some point and became “craftsmen” … the likes of which we aspire to be one day. I think that’s where rob and I and our divergent musical tastes definitely come together in appreciation of bands and writers like We’re About 9 and Richard Shindell. And it’s not the ornate writers … no, the real respect goes out to the rare and gifted who find magic in the most mundane … who manage to say something integral to the human experience simply and elegantly, and cut to the heart of that which you see and feel every day and could never quite explain yourself. As Brian Gundersdorf sings in is ode to the Sunday morning IHOP, “I always have the grilled cheese, but I always have the crisis.”
And then sometimes I like to listen to Britney Spears and I really admire the complex harmony line of an N-Sync song (“Girlfriend”).- THAT’s what’s great about the love of music and letting it affect you in whatever way it wants to. Sometimes it makes you sad, and you love it because you want something to find that part of you. Sometimes you want the perfect song to match your cross-country drive. Sometimes you want to put on some hip hop and dance with a hairbrush in your bedroom.
I forget that people care about how I write, how rob writes. That we are, for some other people, what those other songwriters are for us. Music makes us all equal, and we are all fans of SOMEBODY, no matter what tier we reach. Dylan is in awe of someone, Brian Gundersdorf is in awe of Richard Shindell, I am still in awe of rob, so it would follow that someone out there might be in awe of me. I have very little egotism about my songwriting, and my status as an “artist.” But recently I made of “present” of a detailed song explanation to one of the e-bay sponsors who bought my song. As a second-time sponsor, I felt like I should give her something, and she’d expressed how much the limited information about the song she had fascinated her and prompted her bid.
So without egotism, in case any of you are interested, a little bit about the history of my development as a songwriter. I went through a major growth process in the last few years. As a former journalist, I originally found it impossible to “lie” in my songs. I could only write about things that I had experienced, which is honest, but limiting. I think sometimes it’s crushing when you realize all you’re getting out of a performer is their imagination and creativity, and not being let in at all to their life. I think the more I tour, though, the more I am of the belief that it’s okay for me to give people my creativity and not my life. 🙂
Essentially, what I think you get out of a songwriter is a unique vision. Ideally, you get something interpreted by them as only they could have seen it, whether it was played out in their mind’s eye or right in front of them. And then you apply it to your own life if you want, if it speaks to you. You find your own message. I was faced with the fact that most of the songs I thought were the most amazingly written were not autobiographical. Sometimes in music, when you try to write what you know … you actually find you’re too close to the subject after all.
I consider my work as existing in four phases. The pre-rob years, the post-journalism years where I was exposed to a lot of very influencial songwriting, the bridge years between fact and poetic license, and where I am now. Songs that most of you have never heard fall into the first category: “Memory,” “Falling,” “Time to Go,” “Orion.” These songs were all directly ripped from my life. Every single line had happened to me, even if I was writing in a much more traditionally poetic way. My biggest influence at the time was the Indigo Girls.
Then when I met rob and was introduced to another way acoustic music could be written and performed, I started experimenting with lyric rhythm, off-kilter rhymes, new chords. I still could not make things up, though. “Matador,” “Pine,” “Sever,” and the unreleased “Embers” all fall into this time period. I was learning how to use my voice to sing original material, and finding my own style. My major influences were certainly Rob and Ani DiFranco.
The third phase is where most of the transition really happened. I started listening more to (not to sound too much like a fan girl) Richard Shindell and We’re about 9 much more intently as a songwriter deconstructing great work. I also started listening to the more unique storytelling aspects of folk music, and I started going to slams and writing slam poetry. Things that were drawn from my life – but gently doctored – started to come out. Save Berlin is all true and all the imagery is real, but the events are all speculative (incidentally this song is the most personal of all of mine and the one I feel the most uncomfortable playing, at times. It was a song that just came out, like a lyrical gag reflex or something. It’s what I had to write more than something I wanted to write.).
This led to the bigger step toward complete fiction: In the Water. If I had to pick a single song that marked the defining moment in my life as a songwriter, it would be that one. I set out for the first time to write about something completely outside of myself, from a completely fictional perspective, with completely invented imagery based only loosely on a real story heard through the mouth of a psychic on a talk show. And it was about more than the lyrics. I wrote the verses in a childish, sing-song fashion to mirror the subject matter. I began taking a much more holistic approach to my songwriting. Other songs like “Letters From the Front,” “Parallels” (a permanently in progress song written from the perspective of a parallel line in love with its unattainable counterpart) and ” Illinois is Overflowing” followed.
Nowadays, I take wild license with my songs. I’ve been writing a ton, and mostly they have come from interesting lines or interesting stories that I want to tell. I’ve written a song, in the polish phases, about a car repair shop called “God is in the Gears,” which is completely fictional and based solely off the real-life imagery of how much those crosses on the back of tow trucks look like crucifixes. Did I mention I’m Jewish?
In progress, is a “project” song, which arose from my found object jewelry with the same concept: people waste great lines that they just throw out in regular conversation. I’ve overheard some doosies in coffee shops. So I’m trying to write an entire song where not a single line is mine, forming connections between these otherwise disparate snatches of conversation. It’s not actually as hard as you might think. I already have one verse, complete with three different quotes made by as many different people, and part of a chorus. Human beings want to make connections. Week seek them whether they are there or not, and you find what you look for.
Finished and in performance recently is a song called, “Simile Blue,” written from a series of influences: Will playing us old recordings of “When You Wish Upon A Star,” rob’s father’s death, “Ghost in the Shell 2,” Will taking apart a dead bird, and my admiring of Dave Pahanish and Angie Aparo’s tendencies toward very simple, single-word, single-held-note choruses.
I’m also working on a country song, done except for the chorus, that is heavily influenced by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, borrows one of the found lines from my other project, and has a heavy dose of my Nashville visit mixed in. It’s about trains, and a fucked-up marriage. I am not married, and I have been one on round-trip train ride in my life.
I think my goals these days are lyrical power AND simplicity (John Darnielle is my teacher at the moment, along with the Kings of Convenience), vocal inflection, enunciation and a true use of some of the abandoned notes of my soprano range, and expanding my chord vocabulary so I can write music that is better than just what I CAN do, and more fitting with what the song DEMANDS. Just like the way those simple piano chords in “Let It Be,” love it or hate it, are almost a gospel song, almost a prayer, almost a funeral dirge. Or maybe they are that way because of the association my mother has for that song, and passed on to me.
Tag, you’re it, rob. How do you think you’re writing style has changed over time? What are your goals there? What are you aspiring to?
