Dears,
I wrote two songs this week. It made me think about what it is to be in a songwriting place, as I am not always in such places and even when I am, it is of the two-songs-per-week variety vs. some other kind of burn rate that might get you on a podcast. One of these songs is about being alive and loving someone knowing you will not always be alive. The other is about changing the clocks from daylight savings time back to standard time and how losing that hour at this time of year leads one to insights like the aforementioned, because of sleep deprivation and living in darkness.
The clock-changing song, (an answer to a song from maybe 17 years ago called “Lightsaver,” made on the morning of Daylight Savings Time,) really took shape during a conversation around my kitchen table. “I heard it’s because of farming.” “No, that’s a myth, it’s because of the TV companies.” I was listening and watching, and could tell there was something in this conversation to work through. On the surface they are talking about this pedestrian thing, but the anchor is concern and care, a kind of advocacy for not changing the clocks on my behalf as I slump and walk into walls and recall dreams about downsizing in Connecticut but keeping the kids in school in Minnesota and keeping my job somehow. This is why I write songs, I think; to tease out the currents under surface scenes, to figure out where everyone’s tether is connected, and to what, and why.
But this note is not really about those specifics, the situation revealed to be more complex and rich. It is about how one walks through the world, if making songs is a thing that one might sometimes do. The closest I have felt to this feeling was during The Great Dream Journaling Experiment of 2014; I was in pretty intense psychoanalysis, story for another day, and every session was about what I could remember of my dreams. I thought it would be good preparation to keep a dream journal, and so for a week, in between two sessions, I did. And it was completely berserk. It felt like I was dreaming for the page, like I had opened up some connection between my waking mind that wrote things down and my sleeping mind that was more than happy to serve up weirder and weirder images and situations. Like: my brother, in Iraq at the time in non-dream life, and I are in a tower, looking at a shark in a tank. I throw a pillow at the glass, as a joke, and the whole thing explodes and we are running down the stairs with the flood and shark behind us and then try to escape through New York City streets on a motorcycle. I mean, of course.
Sidebar: I considered the lyric “never tell anyone your dreams” but it sounded sappy when what I really mean is: your dreams are not interesting to anyone but you. Not your HOPES AND DREAMS dreams, your nighttime dreams. See? Hard to make it make sense.
Songs are like dreams in this way, for me: the world seems to serve up the situations to populate the songs, once you start making note of these situations, or rather start noticing things that could maybe be sung. But I want to be deliberate about saying that it is not like you are looking for songs in the quotidian. Rather, the quotidian seems to change in order to be more song-like; it seems like your life bends towards song. It doesn’t feel like it’s the looking that changes. It feels like the things you see are transforming before your eyes.
Of course this is the thing about mood and perspective. We don’t realize that we’re looking through a glass, and the glass is distorting what is in front of it. We attribute it to the thing we see, a change in its nature when really it is a change in our nature. Not mining the world for song, but noticing that the world, when we are in that songmaking place, seems to want to be noticed in a different way, seems to announce itself, seems to want to sing. Or, maybe, (and I like to think that,) the glasses are not song-colored but rather more like 20/20; they show what is actually there, and what is actually there is on fire, in the best possible way, that there is light coming out of the quotidian and songs attune us to it.
I wish you resplendence in the everyday,
A