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Notebook Thursday: Puttering

6/8/2023

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A creative director at my first day job used to talk fondly of the agency where she'd started out, where designers had a timesheet code they could use for "time spent staring out the window." What she missed was the official recognition—lacking in most workplaces—that creative work demands downtime. Sometimes the brain works best when your attention wanders.

Puttering is the name I tend to give this process; apparently that's the more American word for it. UK usage favors pottering. The OED defines the verb potter as "occupy oneself in a desultory but agreeable manner; move or go about whilst occupied in such a way." The Online Etymology Dictionary adds "be busy in doing little," and notes that it seems to be a frequentative verb, similar to chatter. (Which suggests that fretter might be the verb for pottering with a guitar—if we didn't already have noodle.) It also includes a graph showing that usage of potter is about half what it was in 1800. I wonder how that graph might align with the spread of models of industrial productivity.

I, for one, have not had much time for puttering lately. I miss it, and I'm pretty sure my creative work is suffering for the lack. The sticky-note wall might qualify, since it is fundamentally aimless. But that's no more than a minute or two a day. A minute is not a lot of downtime. 

I just encountered Hanif Abdurraqib's description of an annual braided-vignette document on a random topic of interest, which can grow to hold a book's worth of words that will never be public. I love that idea, and I'm curious about what the songwriting equivalent would look like. Perhaps a rhyme/stanza game within the St. Jerome's document? The band's goofing around with parody songs and Unbelievable Truth mashups might serve a similar function. Certainly digging in to etymology does. 
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Notebook Thursday: Drive (Guest Post)

6/1/2023

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Nate Hall is an actor and musician based in Chicago. He is the composer and cowriter (with Cody Lindley) of Stabbed in the Heart, a new slasher-dramedy musical aiming for an October production. Support it with a donation or by buying tickets to its June 4 concert performance at Redline VR's Raven Room. Follow Nate on Instagram: @50firstnates

Drive is a concept that I think about every time I listen to or write music, to the point of often and rightfully deserved parody from my partner. I don’t know that my definition is one that is fully tangible, but I’ll try to break it down here.

When I’m listening to a song I’m really digging, I find myself moving my body in some way. Whether that’s a typical tapping of the foot or a less typical tightening of my shoulders while my fingers curl on a satisfying change, it’s pretty much inevitable. I crave being literally moved by the music I’m listening to.

So, drive is a way to make the music move forward. Less sitting on each beat and more jumping to the next beat too early out of pure excitement for what’s coming next. I want the listener to hop on for the roller coaster ride and put their hands up as we crest an apex, to be an active participant in the listening process.

There are a lot of ways to evoke this elation, but the most obvious to me is through syncopation. The easiest and most efficient way to surprise and intrigue, until you use it too much of course (then the boring becomes your tool of surprise, and the cycle continues). However, I wouldn’t say that a genre like jazz, practically the king of syncopation, is driving in all cases. Though the improvisation inherent in jazz creates some pockets for musicians to shock and awe their audiences, it can sometimes fall prey to its own atmosphere, becoming more of a philosophical think piece with superficially deep “hmms” and “ahs.”

That’s where the riff comes in. I love masterworks of composition by Sondheim as much as the next guy, but the opening riff to Stereogram’s "Walkie Talkie Man" that I heard on a Nintendo DS game in the early 2000s will permanently hold a spot in my brain despite anything I ever do to erase it (why would I, but point made). I love me some Joe Satriani marathon solos, but have you heard the chord progression in Carly Rae Jepsen’s "Call Me Maybe"? Cause I sure have and I am not tired of it and I think that MATTERS.
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Though my process changes all the time, one constant has been basing songs off of core riffs that were fun to play and that made me want to hear the riff again, or push forward (drive, get it?). The catch is that I still need the improvisation in there somewhere to make that riff unexpected. To incorporate it, I will record a riff whenever it comes up, but then give it a title that has nothing to do with what it is. In fact, the further from the actual tone and vibe of the riff, the better. Here are some real riff titles on my phone: “string jumpy blib”, “chuuuuug”, “fhuc”, “go go”, “dirty queen”, and “don’t do it lol”. I have no idea what any of these riffs are, and that’s the point. When I have some lyrics I’m playing around with, I go diving into my voice recordings and pick the first title that comes up. Usually, this results in me using riffs for lyrics that I wouldn’t have associated that way otherwise.

Did I properly define drive? Most certainly not. And honestly, for the sake of all my future songs and musicals, I hope I’m never able to.
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Notebook Thursday: The Boguettes

5/25/2023

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Back in January, at my sister's request, the band got together to record a spoof of "We Got the Beat" with lyrics adjusted to commemorate her lab team's research into the bacteria that inhabit peat bogs. (Climate change is affecting these species, and they have the potential to affect the climate in turn.)

We had a very silly good time; we also laid down a passable demo of one of the new Backroads tracks, "Okay Okay"; there was cake. Sarah put the result over a video of her team at work—which means that not only is her work more vital than mine, she's also far more efficient at producing music videos.

Anyway, between this and The Unbelievable Truth, quite a bit of our work this spring has turned out to be Parody for Hire. I'm not mad about it. I always wind up learning some new detail of song construction or lyrics. There's audio* of the moment Julie figured out, midsong, that the lyrics from "Gaston" could be sung to "I Will Survive"; it's delightful as much for the combination of songs as for the reactions of the rest of the group. For a band whose members know each other because of a TMBG fan site and Strange Tree Group, parody is a productive place to hang out. 

It's also just fact—kind of a sad fact, really—that the joke songs are the ones that get the most hits. ("And to All a Good Night," recorded for another edition of Unbelievable Truth, has more YouTube plays than the entire Highway Gothic/Everything I Think I Know Is Wrong catalog of songs.) I do enjoy the way most of them are recorded under various aliases: costume selves I can slip into and out of at will. Maybe I need to start treating our darker songs as jokes too. 

*It's on Julie's TikTok, which I would link to, except it turns out I'm just as bad at the desktop version of TikTok as I am at the app.
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Notebook Thursday: Hands

5/18/2023

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As a rule I approach learning a new piece with a stubborn optimism that may border on quixotic. I may be a lousy sightreader, I may have to work through one measure a day, but I will work, and I will keep working. So it's noteworthy when I try something and conclude that it is permanently beyond my abilities.

In high school, my piano teacher gave me a transcript of Gershwin's performance of "The Man I Love." I have fairly long hands—I can span a tenth—but I could not physically get my fingers onto all the notes Gershwin was hitting. I haven't seen anything about the size of Gershwin's hands; I don't know if it was a Rachmaninoff situation. But I do remember sitting on the piano bench in baffled defeat. And I wonder now if he was playing things that seemed obvious to him because they were within his abilities: notes and graces that would never occur to the mere mortals who are just focusing on correctly rolling from the bottom to the top of a twelfth.

Bach has been a constant of the pandemic for me. A month or two ago I started working on a guitar setting of the cello suite everyone knows, using the same measure-by-measure approach I've used for Well-Tempered Clavier. It quickly became evident that the piece was going to make me a better guitarist, forcing me to focus on clean note releases and careful left-hand placement. And the stretches—whew. In several measures the index finger is on the third fret while the pinky reaches to the seventh, a span that is, if not overtly rude, certainly not the most standard in rock.* (The performance in that link uses a different arrangement from the one I've been using, relying on open strings and less-stretchy fingerings in ways that honestly might make more sense. But arrangers usually have their reasons, so I'm sticking to this one unless it becomes truly Gershwin-level prohibitive.) 

My pinkies are a little hyperextensive, and sometimes the top joint will lock in a way that probably protects a tendon but absolutely does not help with guitar. So I tend not to use the left pinky much in melodic play, giving the important notes to the more reliable ring finger. It turns out that—like any other dang body part—the pinky gets stronger when you exercise it regularly. The "White Flag" bassline is my usual gauge for whether my left hand is in performance shape; reader, it is so easy right now.

What has surprised me, though, is how much this has opened up other songs. I am not typically a riff-based songwriter, but as pinky movement has become more natural, several riffs have just sort of— appeared and offered themselves, as vocal melodies do. The notes and graces have become obvious. I am trying to live up to them. One became the lead-up to the chorus in "C'est la guerre"—I think it works?—and the others may or may not cohere into full songs. I don't really have a method for working this way; I have to figure that out too.

Anyway. I have been thinking about the intersection between playing and songwriting, and the ways performance shapes the body in turn. It's a given in acting and dance, but for some reason—despite the permanent quarter-inch of callus on my fingertips—I haven't thought about it so much in music. I don't have any big conclusions yet. Except of course it reshapes you, of course it changes you. So does everything worth doing.

*It does happen a bit more in classical guitar, where there are warmups devoted to achieving the four-fret stretch, but as my guitar background is not at all classical, this has been quite the learning curve.**
**Charlie's not the only one who can do footnotes!
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Notebook Thursday: An Update on the Sticky Notes

5/11/2023

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I posted a few weeks ago about starting a wall of sticky notes in the name of writing...something. Since then the number of notes has increased, but the final form remains elusive. I'm certain there's at least one lyric here. Other things may be poems? Hard to say.
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Even if I don't know much about the product, I think I've figured out a few things about the process.

First, the habit of noting odd ideas or phrases is an old one; many of these would normally have gone into my lyric notebook (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have written in there less since starting this). When I was writing more prose, these might have found their way into background descriptions.

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Second, whereas ideas in the notebook often vanish, these persist, since I see them every day as I work. I don't actually know if that's good. They gain a sense of inevitability this way—and although you want that in a lyric, it should come from the lyric's strength, not your own overfamiliarity. Ideas in the notebook have to fight harder to claim a part of my attention. They wind up culling themselves that way. These gain profundity by position.

Third, I notice that I actively look for phrases to include as I go through my day. As when I joined friends for collaborative poetry projects—a sonnet line exchange, a haiku notebook passed back and forth—the world seems to come alive with details and words. This I love: the reminder that the ability to notice is, more than anything else, a choice. (And whew, does that remind me of the sheer number of chaotic, abandoned writing experiments with which my past is littered.)

I also quite enjoy the way juxtaposition creates new rhythms and ideas as the notes accrete and spread across the wall. As a rule, it's best not to think too much about the origins of a phrase—it should work in its new context without relying on that background information—but I love knowing that mean, in the note at right, was an adjective when I wrote it down and became a verb as soon as it was next to another note. I don't entirely have control over that, and I suspect that the lack of control is good for me. The next step is probably to hand all the notes over to the band and see what new combinations emerge.
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Where does it all go? I don't know. In cleaning out my office I just found an ancient sticky note, adhesive caked with grit, on which I had written Today I will practice calm. (Erm. That worked.) The transient nature of sticky notes probably means you shouldn't take them too seriously.

Postscript: I just read the NYT piece on creativity, and the footer recommended this one, with its photo of a Post-It wall, from 2014. I don't know what that juxtaposition means either.
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Notebook Thursday: Inconvenience

5/4/2023

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Ryan (of the Unswept) keeps threatening to write about the Lawnmower Theory of Songwriting, which posits that you'll come up with your best ideas when your hands are otherwise occupied and you have no way to write anything down. I rarely find myself mowing, but quite a few songs have presented themselves while I ride my bike. It's possible we need a bit of resistance to figure out which ideas are strong.
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This week I finally finished the lyrics for "C'est la guerre," an idea that has been trying to happen for several years. I wrote last month about the process of clarifying a messy draft via a second longhand draft, a step that seems just terribly inefficient and inconvenient. What if you work from one notebook page to another, and then have to consult your French dictionary, and then run the lyrics past your Francophone friend to double-check? I regret to inform you that these obstacles seem to improve the writing even more.

I have a suspicion about why: many lyrics involve making the unconscious conscious, putting words around something our senses experience in an instant, giving the slower conscious mind a logical grasp of what instinct already comprehends. So the entire lyrical process is one of slowing down, smashing words together like flint rocks to help the duller wit feel the fire the body knows.

(That idea came to me, naturally, while I was wrist-deep in rhubarb and sugar for a rehearsal pie.)

We've all been talking a lot about what ChatGPT means for the arts. There is a large amount of healthy (and justified) resentment that tech bros with only a superficial understanding of art are wrecking industries and careers that have taken lifetimes to build. Of particular offense is the idea that AI can remove all the cumbersome work from the process of creation.

At the risk of sounding too paradoxical, the work is the work. All of this is ultimately concerned with the anguish of being finite beings who can comprehend infinity but never experience it, who must exist within painfully brief stretches of time and try somehow to make meaning out of the inevitable end. Remove the end, and you remove the meaning. Remove the process of reconciling form to intent, and you remove the art. (To me, this is akin to what Clarke was getting at in "The Nine Billion Names of God"—which perhaps more tech bros ought to read.) So I can't trust anything that promises to make the process too easy. Of course I resent the inconveniences. But I seem to need them.
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Notebook Thursday: Rise of the Machines (Guest Post)

4/20/2023

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Charlie O'Brien is a founding member of The Unswept, who play International Pop Overthrow on Sunday, April 25, at Montrose Saloon.
ChatGPT has only been publicly available since November 2022, and I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t constantly seeing shared attempts at getting the machine to write something creative. Once I discovered “write a Wikipedia-style entry about…” as a prompt, the Unswept’s band text thread quickly became a place to share hallucinatory alternate histories of the band (which have a troubling tendency of killing off Ryan).

I get it—the novelty of entering a prompt and seeing coherent text appear near-instantaneously is undeniable, and it’s a pretty short leap from there to “I wonder if this thing can write songs.” And it can— sorta. A supercomputer trained on the right data can emulate the technical formalities and structure of a poem or set of lyrics (such as the syllable count or the rhyme scheme), but they usually only approach emotional resonance incidentally or accidentally. Far more often, it will create a simplified pastiche of pre-existing art, devoid of the elements that make the original interesting (Colin Meloy wrote that ChatGPT’s new Decemberists song is “remarkably mediocre,” while Nick Cave assessed an AI-generated Nick Cave song as being “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”).

It’s foolhardy to expect this new generation of large language models to instantly generate meaningful, finished art. But what if we view these tools as collaborators rather than an instant song factory—less an outsourcing of creative work and more an infinitely renewable deck of oblique strategies? As with most machines, the best output tends to come from the most refined input. So rather than tasking ChatGPT with creating an idea from scratch, I figured I at least needed to give it a title.

I first typed the phrase “time is running away from me” in an email at work—I was searching for a different figure of speech (perhaps “time is catching up with me”), but that’s what came out instead. I had a vague idea for a melody behind those words, a vague sense of what the title implied (a subtle indictment of the time crunch that capitalism puts us all into?), and a spare 10 minutes. So I directed my web browser to ChatGPT, performed a CAPTCHA to prove that I myself wasn’t a robot, typed "write a buncha verses of an uptempo rock song called Time Is Running Away From Me about losing track of goals and deadlines because of the inexorable passage of time” and hit enter. Ten seconds later, I was staring at a lyric sheet:

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Notebook Thursday: Chucking It All, Almost

4/6/2023

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I found the first draft of "Got Lucky" this week, and decided to post it here because—though I remembered that the song needed revision—I had forgotten it was such a mess. This shows just how much I had to throw away to arrive at the final version.

At upper right is the chorus. If you read music, you might notice that the notes against the D and Bm chords aren't the recorded melody—they're the harmony that Charlie sings. I kept jumping up to the F# when I played the song, and it took a while to figure out that it wasn't actually a mistake. (Charlie says "Alone Again Or" developed this way too.) 

The early verses I might as well have ripped out of the notebook entirely. ("No one ever swept me up / They always swiped away"? Eesh.) At top left are a bunch of rhymes I didn't use. A little lower is the part where I realized I'd accidentally plagiarized a rhyme from "9 to 5." On the right things get Westerberg-ish with "All they ever took from me was everything I owned," which might be worth using in some other song. At the bottom is "They'll tell you there's a lid for every pot / That's how you know you've lost the plot." Which I don't hate, but perhaps ought to. Anyway, it's not in the final song.
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The page was crowded enough with competing ideas that I had to start a new one. Every so often it happens that way. I used a different notebook—bigger, with more white space—and copied only the lines I was pretty sure I wanted to keep. I filled in the other stuff later (which you can tell, since the ink color is different). And this version, too, had a couple of things that didn't take.
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Things I kept from the first draft: 
  1. The title
  2. The bridge (still my favorite part)
  3. The chord progression
  4. The lyrics for the first verse (which you can tell was a late-breaking idea, by the way it's wedged into the space in the gutter of the first notebook)
Even the bottom version isn't final, because it doesn't have the false Bm ending—that was a suggestion from Charlie the first time I brought it to the whole band. Every so often, finishing a song takes a level of persistence that verges on foolhardy. It's kind of fitting that it happened with this one, a song about striking gold after years of striking out.

​The Unswept will play "Got Lucky" in their April 23 set at International Pop Overthrow, Montrose Saloon, Chicago.
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Notebook Thursday: Elsewheres and Collisions

3/31/2023

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Several songs are at a point where it would be lethal to discuss their processes instead of working on them directly, so instead here's a quick roundup of ideas that have been feeding into my creative process of late:
  • Elisa Gabbert in the NYT Book Review on what poetry is and isn't
  • Josh Terry on AI in music, with a killer quote from Nick Cave (and a nod to a great Emmylou Harris/Delbert McClinton song)​
  • Austin Kleon on curiosity
  • Ted Gioia on the Orphic quest
  • Anne Helen Peterson on various lives in art

Things are chaotic enough this spring that an interesting pastiche might result from the chaos itself. Yesterday there were several phrases banging around in my head without any sort of clear form or creative imperative. I wrote them on sticky notes with a brush pen (a Pentel, another Austin Kleon recommendation for slowing down and focusing thoughts) and put them on the wall over my desk. I'm going to keep adding to the assembly and see what sorts of meanings arise from the new juxtapositions as the words become detached from their original contexts. (Part of me feels it's necessary to describe this process here just in case I die suddenly: to the uninitiated eye, this could easily look like some sort of terrifying conspiracy-theory psychotic break. I swear it's just art.)
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Baked: Four Ingredients and the Truth

3/27/2023

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I would be remiss not to discuss actual baguettes on this blog at some point. I usually opt for pain d'epi, the wheat-ear loaf—same recipe, more crust, easier sharing.

I can't take any credit for the recipe; it's the one in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Bread flour, yeast, water, salt. That's it: four ingredients. It does have to be bread flour, not all-purpose. And I might go a little heavy on the salt, but that scarcely counts as a modification. 

One thing I have figured out, though, is that you can use the flat side of a cast iron griddle as a baking stone. (Lodge has "use it in the oven" right there in the product description, so this is hardly groundbreaking kitchen science on my part.) This approach, in combination with a steam tray, yields the most perfect crusts I ever hope to achieve.

When we shared a lineup with Underwire in 2019, they brought cupcakes for the audience, as part of their band tradition. Should we start doing this with baguettes? 
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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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