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!
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