Welcome to 2013. This year, I will leave my room. I will play shows. I will meet new and wonderful people. I will win at least two contests. I will write 50 songs, and complete mastered recordings of 36 of them. These are my goals.
I sold my tour van to a 72-year old hook-handed Scotsman today. On the other hand, he had two fingers and a thumb. Oh, and two replaced hips, and he can't pick it up until Friday because he's got an appointment at the cancer clinic. He made me promise never to work with asbestos. Fine by me.
I'm also writing my next batch of songs. I started with a list of song ideas, much like I did for the last album, but this time I'm working on them less linearly. I'm getting the song's message down first and writing with that as a guide, trying to stay as true to it as I can. A couple of ways I have found for dealing with a song that has me blocked: playing energetic covers and coming back to the song can psyche me into a more adventurous and productive mood. Also, writing the next idea as nakedly and unpoetically as I can seems to be very helpful. If I can read the idea I can visualize different ways to dress it up, make it fit with the rest of the song.
So I have five new ones that I'm sure I'll use, and another old one that I can re-purpose (like I did with "Wonderful Life" on the last CD). I'm about halfway there. Here's the little paragraph I wrote in my notebook about how these songs are related:
I sold my tour van to a 72-year old hook-handed Scotsman today. On the other hand, he had two fingers and a thumb. Oh, and two replaced hips, and he can't pick it up until Friday because he's got an appointment at the cancer clinic. He made me promise never to work with asbestos. Fine by me.
I'm also writing my next batch of songs. I started with a list of song ideas, much like I did for the last album, but this time I'm working on them less linearly. I'm getting the song's message down first and writing with that as a guide, trying to stay as true to it as I can. A couple of ways I have found for dealing with a song that has me blocked: playing energetic covers and coming back to the song can psyche me into a more adventurous and productive mood. Also, writing the next idea as nakedly and unpoetically as I can seems to be very helpful. If I can read the idea I can visualize different ways to dress it up, make it fit with the rest of the song.
So I have five new ones that I'm sure I'll use, and another old one that I can re-purpose (like I did with "Wonderful Life" on the last CD). I'm about halfway there. Here's the little paragraph I wrote in my notebook about how these songs are related:
This album addresses fears I have that I can be childish and shallow in personal relationships. It's about not being emotionally mature enough to truly love. It's about intelligence being squandered by poor emotional understanding and control. It's about learning what it is to be fair and good to others without that being at the expense of oneself. Its thesis is that empathy is essential to happiness.As a consequence of this, the protagonist in a lot of these songs is me indulging some of my more stunted and infantile desires. The best one so far is made almost entirely of playground rhymes. I like it because I think it's enjoyable at many levels of intellectual and thematic involvement, from first-listen background music to tenth-listen lyric-booklet-in-the-lap. For now when this happens it's fairly accidental, but it's something I hope I'll be able to learn to do better with time. Just look at The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living by The Streets. I do envy the words per minute of his genre. Ah well.
