Jack-o-Lantern Heart

In a desperate attempt to capture a melody I heard in a recent dream, I've spent the last few weeks writing a new song that I just posted to my music page on myspace a few minutes ago. Check it out!

As for my Halloween plans as a busker, I thought I might as well make the full metamorphosis that I've been undergoing slowly and don the guise of Bob Dylan. I certainly know enough of his songs to make it through a three hour set. Unfortunately, I'm incredibly hungry and have decided to visit the grocery store instead. I hope 23rd St can get on without me.

Expect a bunch of new songs soon. I've been writing up a storm of (typically) unfinished lyrics, but now that I'm back from that Boston gig, I can really buckle down and finish 'em off.

Now go do yourself a favor and watch The Innocents. I don't care what anybody says; it's the scariest movie I've ever seen.

Though I only harvest song

The challenge for this week was to go busking every single night in hopes that I might raise some R 'n R money for this weekend's trip to Boston. Unfortunately, sleep and a number of unfortunates have derailed this plan slightly, but I picked it up again tonight in hopes of making a comeback worthy of any jaw-droppingly goregeous slow-clap sequence.

No such luck. As I've said before, people are sketchy late at night (myself included), and I was unable to get out to the tracks before 11 tonight, so I had to deal with them. Not a lot of cash to show for my troubles, but I did start out doing an all-original set including some newer songs that I've been working on. As soon as I figure out how to post them in some free, exciting manner on here, I will. For now, you'll just have to imagine a couple haunting chords and some lyrics that are probably too pretentious for their own good. What else is new?

I received a MTA pass from a passerby tonight. He said he didn't have any cash, but had a couple bucks on the card. I accepted it gratefully, mentioning that if there's one thing I always need to have in order to busk, it's a means of admission to the platform.

That is until jetpack busking gets a little more well-deserved attention. Ah, day of days!

Whose Cider You On, Anyway?

There's a job I'd like to have. Driving a subway. I'd get to see all sorts of crazy underground catacombs that I'd keep telling myself I'd one day explore and settle in, but ultimately never do more than shine a flashlight beam upon. I'd get to take out aggression on slow, unwitting commuters who are unfortunate enough to end up between the doors of my tyranny. And I'd probably get to see a lot of cool buskers if I was that driver in the middle, who probably shouldn't be called a driver since I don't think you can do that from the center car on a subway train. But far be it from me to say what the responsibilities of this position are. I just know it would be fun. Just looking around to make sure everyone's inside the Cool Train. And checking out the tunesy wares of someone such as myself. The other self. I mean...'cos I'm just imagining myself driving the train. But that imagined self would be watching my real self do selfy things.

Long story short, there actually are one or two drivers (or whatever) that I see on occasion who nod and bop along with my music, and even give me a nice little wave from time to time. One guy gave me the peace sign tonight (I'll assume it wasn't that "most-likely-an-urban-legend-but-in-Australia-this-means-up-yours" sign). I think that's right cool....these guys don't have to do anything at all in regards to me, and I'm glad they seem to be enjoying themselves and can give me encouragement through signage.

On the other hand, you don't gotta look all peeved at me. Some lady tonight gave me a look like I'd suddenly produced all the works of Chaucer by tugging them from my rectum and then had to sit down and explain to her who Chaucer was (I'm not trying to be mean, but you weren't there. Trust me. She has no clue who Chaucer is). Why the look? Sure, I'm not necessarily ushering people onto the train or cleaning up the station or otherwise benefiting your cause. But am I hindering it? Am I a musical remora attached to the soft underbelly of your infrastructure? Am I merely a penny-pinching planarian parasite perusing the plains of your putrid, petty, pancreatic plaza? I think not. So don't give me a look like you just sucked on an egg that was filled with lemon juice. Because if that happened, you should be giving that look to your grocer.

In other news, I've decided that when I grow up, I want to be like the cool guy tonight who hopped off the train, skipped over to my guitar case (his fine cashmere coat rippling behind him), to drop a stack of ones in, without even hearing me play. Definitely want to be like that. Some day. Right after I settle in to my new apartment in that subway catacomb.

Awktoeburr Boiz

When you want to talk on your cell phone, chances are you seek out the solitude of a nice, tranquil New York City subway station, right?

I didn't think so.

Well, some lady tonight did just that, and brough her two year old kid along for the joyride. She didn't seem to mind telling her boyfriend/husband/whoever over the phone that I was "some nobodeeee playing cowntry music and sanging and -- ow! I am naht in da mood for dis shit!" My temptation was to play a little louder -- after all, what did she expect? Trains were zooming all over the place. Well, mostly on the tracks. Anyway, I let it slide and she eventually retreated to an corner where my dastardly "cowntry" music couldn't offend her senses.

Not much else happened tonight...somebody told "God Bless You" when they made a donation tonight. I was touched at first, then thought that perhaps my singing voice resembled a sneeze. Or that I looked like a bum again.

I also failed to provide any of the requests of a certain donor. She asked if I knew any Bruce Springsteen, or a bevvy of 90s artists including Rob Thomas, Goo Goo Dolls, or Creed (shudder). And I couldn't think of a single song by any them! I like Springsteen, but the other requests were just never anything I'd considered learning before. I heard so much Creed in high school that I think I may be ready to give them a shot by the time I'm 50 something. But hopefully never. Still, I felt bad that my inner library of 90s music + Springsteen was failing miserably in public (although, to her discredit, she didn't seem to know who Oasis, Travis, or Radiohead were...how could she call herself a 90s fan?!?).

Later, I enjoyed some tasty sausage pizza (with requisite hot sauce) with my earnings. Busking's totally worth it if only for making obsolete my ATM card.

Acoustic Lightning

I realized just now that I have very little control over the type of music I write. Sure, I can cross out words and rearrange chords, but the type of song I've got rolling around in my ribs is going to come out one way or the other, like it or not. Okay, so maybe my songs have grown a lot since I wrote my first one way back in middle school. But then again, have they really? Sometimes when I listen to my old stuff, I think, "geez, I would never know how to write something like that now! It's so free and sprawling and sincere." In another few years, I may say the same thing about the song I was working on today.

If I've learned anything in my few years as an artist, actor, musician, writer....it's that sometimes you have to kinda forget what you've learned. It's great stuff to have and all, like a backbone. An outline. Discipline, structure. But in the end, what matters is creative drive and work ethic. I don't mean to slip into self-help mode here...I guess I'm just trying to talk myself through some of these realizations that I've had many a time, which will probably repeat their appearances in the future.

There's definitely a kind of song I'm after. An honest, woodsy folk song that has elements of true folk music (lyrics and ideas being passed down from one generation of singers to the next) as well as elements of my own personality and outlook on the world. None of that's easy, really. I'm tempted to say that my own viewpoint and take on things is the hardest to grab the reigns on because it's still developing...but then again, the folk element is equally daunting, because it could be so easily forced and tarnished. In the end -- the temporary one anyway -- I'm left with whatever spills out of my fingers and my mouth.

Meanwhile, I'm listening to sequencer-laced, synthesized songs by Tangerine Dream that call to mind crystal-grid mountains in a glistening computer world. Go figure.

Abs in the Night

Having recovered from typhoid or whatever cruelly unrelenting (and therefore, old world) ailment I contracted two weeks ago, I ventured out into the wonderful world of subways again last night.

It was a good night for money. I don't normally talk about that kinda thing on here, but man. It was good. And Lord knows I needed it. It was also a good night for some new songs; I busted out my new piece, "Son of Cain," and tried my hand at Dylan's 11-minute long epic, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (which I think I had previously mentioned was the sole member of an elite recent playlist of mine). All in all, good things happened.

I even had an audience. Sure, she was homeless, drunk, loud, and had an appearance that compelled me to believe she was a stand-in for that Pigeon Lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. But she was supportive! She banged on her corner of the bench with her bottle of liquor shrouded in brown paper so vehemently that it drove away potential donors to my fine cause. So maybe it wasn't that cool.

Finally resigning myself to the fact that she'd never leave (although her surprisingly comprehensive memory of the lyrics to "Rocky Raccoon" was interesting in its own way), I gave up and took the 1 train up just one stop to 28th Street. Ah, yes. FIT fashion students are always patrolling this area in search of some forlorn busker to whom they can give away a sizable morsel of their trust fund. Or so I tend to think. It didn't work out quite like this.

But it wasn't awful, either. I met a guy who books singer/songwriters for a coffee house at Columbia...he told me they're looking pretty full for the fall, but there'd be space in the spring. I thanked him, and he told me he'd get in touch with me via myspace. He was wearing a Dylan hoodie, so he seemed respectable enough.

As I was packing up, a suspicious dude started swaggering his way towards me at quite a pace. I say suspicious, because he seemed to be one of those homeless guys who has headphones on and is carrying a CD player that's yellow and was probably made in 1995, and it's my guess that even if this guy was able to find batteries for it, not even SONY made discmen that had such a notable longevity. Discmen suck, it's a well-known fact. Plus, he had a sleeveless flannel shirt on that was unbuttoned (similar to what I wore in The Full Monty, if any of you saw that) which exposed his (again) suspiciously well-toned abs, and black jeans. That's just not a good sign. So I tried to pack up quick in case he had some nefarious designs to steal my motherlode or deface my capo or something. Instead, the guy gave me a dollar bill. I thanked him, and he held out his fist for me to reciprocate. I fist-hit him (what do you call this? punching?) back, but apparently you're not supposed to do it with your left hand, a matter that he made sure to relay to me for correction. I got him back with my right. He tipped his grungy baseball cap and sauntered off into the night, his suspiciously rock-hard abs cutting the air as he walked.

Talk about abnormal.

An Extra-Special Trip to the Writer's Corner

Funny things used to happen when I got sick. Once, while watching TaleSpin under a haze of fever-induced euphoria, I convinced my mother that even though I hadn't been able to keep any food down in three days, I absolutely needed to eat hot dogs because Baloo was chowing down on some. I'm glad he didn't fly the Sea Duck into the Iron Vulture...I may have attempted to reenact it. Later on, when I got mono in high school, I had a serious craving for twinkies (even though my throat was lined with so many pods of pus it must have looked like those towers of plugged-in mindslaves in The Matrix). Okay, so apparently I just got obsessed with semi-odd food items when I got sick back then. But I also beat Final Fantasy VIII while I had mono. Maybe that's not so weird.

To make a long (and predictable) story short, I'm currently sick. And the only funny thing that's happening is this: because I'm sick and still in the midst of my Full Monty run, I can't risk busking. In short, I'm poor. Make that poor with a capital "P" and pronounced the way my music professor in college preferred (poo-wer). Oh...and being poor isn't so funny when your rent is due.

On the sunny side of my ailment is the opportunity to lay stranded in bed for about twenty hours a day. This is reclined position is of course famously known for being inclined to produce a creativity unparalleled in accomplishment and distinction. I'm pretty sure Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway while sprawled out supine. Copland couldn't have thought of all those crazy intervals while standing up, no sir. And what about the Sistine Chapel? Don't even try to tell me that Michelangelo was on a ladder or some scaffolding for that one!

In light of my inevitable location for any number of days, I've decided to get some writing done on a few songs I've been kicking around the proverbial batchee field. Writing is one of the weirdest things to me...in some ways it gets easier with every piece I finish, and in other ways it gets progressively harder. I tend to get pretty mad when I work on something and realize that it's already been done (most often by me), so the pressure to come up with something completely and utterly new is probably a contributing factor to my songwriter's block. But inspiration can come unexpectedly. I snapped my low E string the other day, leading me to say outloud, "well, great. Now I have to get up and find a replacement string. Otherwise it's gonna sound like it doesn't have any foundation." This "foundation" statement suddenly gave me an idea for a song, which I finished in nearly an hour, called "Son of Cain." It's certainly got some wannabe Dylan elements to it (inevitable, as I've been listening to "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" on repeat for about week), but I'm rather pleased with it, and hope to post in on myspace soon.

I love getting things out of the way. Sometimes I like to let songs stew in the 'ole crockpot in my head so that they come out as near to perfect as can be reasonably expected...but I think I do this way too often. I've got dozens and dozens of songs that I've recorded while drunk or intoxicatingly-inspired that were indeed preserved for posterity in their infant stages, but have never made it out of the nursery. Tons! A few weeks ago I got a little fed up with this and finally completed "Searching For Spring Hill", a song that I started about one year ago. It's up on the old myspace page now for your listening delight.

Finishing "Spring" and writing "Son of Cain" gave me a jolt of energy the other night and I stayed up till all hours brainstorming ideas for a completely new album from the one I've been (slowly) working on since January. I realized that I have about twelve songs or so that have the same general feel...a kind of pastoral, autumnal, eerie, colonial-era feel...and that my new task is to finish these up and record 'em for a new record. My last album (written, not released as of yet) was a double-album conceptual piece called Songs of Inexperience, based on the books of poetry Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. It was pretty complicated stuff (for me, anyhow)...each song on the first CD linked up to a song on the second CD in terms of themes. But this untitled new album will just have a cohesive sense of season and feeling to it, not anything too ornate or out-there. It's actually very refreshing to think about writing it...I almost always make things too difficult for myself. We'll see how things turn out.

In Paul Zollo's interview with Dylan in Songwriters on Songwriting, the great troubadour said that to write songs (his way), he has to empty out all the "good" and "evil" thoughts in his head because they're just "baggage," and "don't mean anything." "Then you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see it but it can't affect you." The idea of entering that kind of dead zone is akin to the notion of learning how to breath properly by zeroing in on your breathing pattern to detect how you're doing things incorrectly without actually consciously changing what it is you're doing (part of the Linklater vocal training I had in college). I've been in that place before, but it's incredibly difficult to find. And once you've found it, it doesn't necessarily get easier to find again. You just gotta keep on trying. "Searching For Spring Hill" came out of that place, as did a handful of my other songs, like "Glassfish" and "Spill the Coffee." It's still not easy to do, though.

In the meanwhile, I'll keep brewing up these ideas of fever dreams, spider bites, jack-o-lantern hearts, wheat fields and hollow trees, and see where that gets me.

Thanks for stopping by the Writer's Corner, kiddies! Come back soon!