My fiction professor used to quote Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Which I think is pretty much true! But which is the most frustrating thing to say to yourself if you're actually feeling kind of blocked! Because of course it demands that you actually examine those inhibitions, which is hardly ever comfortable work, and then it leads on to the work of the writing, which is even less comfortable.

When I run into trouble writing prose, my SOP is to write about why I'm having trouble. I usually wind up hashing it out on paper and eventually getting to the meat of the scene itself. Maybe the analogous musical technique would be to just start strumming and ad-lib some lyrics about how the stupid melodies keep droning around D and all the rhymes are too pat and a few of these emotions feel a bit silly. 

That's really the heart of it, the emotions. A lot of the Highway Gothic songs operated more at the level of narrative than of raw feeling, and I'm venturing back into territory that has grown unfamiliar, unhabituated. (Spellcheck does not even recognize that as a word, but I'm leaving it.) There is a terrifying sense that I might not feel things in a way that is right or acceptable to anyone else. There is a concomitant and clearly defensive urge to overexplain, which might account for why my songs have so many words. 

The real thing to do here, the necessary risk, might be to let the feeling linger on a long, drawn-out note. Resist the urge to fill up the line with syllables of clarification. Leave it there, open and vulnerable.

I looked for a link for that Singer quote and couldn't find it. I wonder now if it was something apocryphal—so many quotes are—a half-remembered line that made it onto the syllabus, blurred many times over in photocopy after photocopy, and then further corrupted in my own memory. Does that affect its truth? Is it truer, somehow, when you present the quote as you want to know it, ​the same way you pull a garment against you when it doesn't  quite fit? We are never dealing with anything but ourselves in this work, our different costumes and shapes and disguises. And always the same body underneath.

For the past couple of years I've been working through Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier as a way to build keyboard chops and stave off pandemic cabin fever. I'm proceeding in circle-of-fifths order through the preludes—I don't have the skill for the fugues yet. Though it's absolutely improving my keyboard work and my musicianship, it's slow going; I assumed that was a referendum on my own abilities until I saw Kimiko Ishizaka's estimate that she needed about two thousand hours of practice for her recording. 

What draws me to Bach, again and again, is the geometry of his work. Each piece has its own internal systems and layers, some immediately evident, some requiring more digging, and the order is elegant and inevitable. Once you have a sense of what the piece is doing, you'll know immediately when you hit a wrong note, even on the first pass. It is as precise as the spiral of a fern fiddlehead or the ice crystals in a snowflake.

For me that structure offers a massive sense of calm. It might seem restrictive at first glance—and I think a lot of Baroque music does get trapped by its own forms—but in Bach it opens to something far more expansive. 

Some of this openness might come from the work of learning Bach. I focus on two or three measures at a time (a method that I recently learned was also Yo-Yo Ma's approach to Bach as a child). This is often dull, often frustrating, but it seems to be the only way I can do it, and the very dullness of the repetition is what opens the door for the life of the music to get in. As the Zen advice goes, if you're bored doing something for one minute, try it for two; if you're bored doing it for two minutes, try it for four; and so on.

Steady practice also means that my time at the piano is a reliable indicator of my headspace. I've heard that, for most instrumentalists, there's very little difference in innate physical capacity for playing fast—that is, the guys who can shred on guitar didn't just naturally luck into superhuman finger speed. Most of it comes down to practice and focus. Playing a detailed melody at tempo requires such concentration that I'm noticeably better if I spend a minute meditating beforehand. When I'm preoccupied, it becomes obvious in lags and skips. Equally dangerous is the self-congratulatory lapse, when I notice a difficult passage has gone well and then grind to a halt in the next measure. This holds some lessons for performance with the band—there's automatically an extra level of distraction when you're in front of an audience, and you don't get the luxury of meditating before every song.

Anyway, I don't know why it didn't occur to me before now to look up Bach's first drafts, but it didn't. And oh, I love them:

This—from the Prelude in C—is so relatable, in a way that I never expected to feel about Bach. I think, especially with the acknowledged Greats, it's easy for pop-culture impressions of genius to get in the way of useful analysis of the processes at hand.  But I really love that this page shows Bach's shorthand, his revisions (the looped insertions! I do that all the time!), his deletions, and his impatience with writing out a melodic motif that, to him, had probably become too obvious to need notation. (There's a more detailed discussion of versions, as well as the family collaboration on Bach's notebooks, at Notes from a Pianist.) As much as melody, this reveals a deeply human wrestling match with the constraints of time and body and tools: a genius borne of persistence.

Songwriting has been on hold for me since Arthur's death. There are hours when it's still hard to find much of any meaning in the new empty quiet, let alone a meaning clear enough to become song. In May I was working on a couple of songs about hope, which have become particularly cruel now. (I still like them. I'll still finish them. I just can't right now.) 

I have been writing a lot, though—this is one of the ways I rediscover meaning. Maybe it counts.

I've come back to another poem I memorized years ago, by the 12th-century Iranian poet Mahsati. This translation is by Deirdre Lashgari, and I don't think it's nearly as well known as it ought to be:

David Ogilvy is supposed to have said, "The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible." He was talking about marketing, but it's a valid approach for pop songwriting. Low-stakes riffing opens a lot of doors.

In an Unswept rehearsal last year, Charlie referred to himself as cheugy. There was some immediate joking, which carried into the band chat, which...turned into a song.

Then the song turned into more joking.

And we recorded it, so it turned into a proper song. But then it turned into even more joking, which is a fun, productive way to work, for something like this. Maybe a nonsense word opens up the music part of your brain, or vice versa. The fine line between stupid and clever is a good place to hang out.

Hidden in the common remark that this is the darkest timeline, there's a secret yearning. If this is one of many options, maybe we're here by mistake; maybe a benevolent deity, any day now, will recognize the error, slap his almighty forehead, and restore us to the happier, kinder, less doomed lives we seem to be missing out on.

So it is with grief, or at least the grief that comes from unexpected trauma. I keep waiting to be told it's all a mistake. Arthur's fine, actually, he didn't die on Sunday, he's about to meet my eyes with his typical impatient affection: What took you so long? The idea that this is my life now, that there are no other options, is too vastly awful to fit inside my comprehension. I don't think it's active denial so much as absolute inability to believe. I am finding quite a lot of substages within the Kübler-Ross framework, possibly including a few that Kübler-Ross never even considered.

These are the times when we turn to poetry: about suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters. I can't yet manage Elizabeth Bishop's feigned ease, but Saeed Jones's "A Spell to Banish Grief" offered something I needed. Most of all my brain returns to Emily Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"—which I had to write about in ninth grade and accidentally learned by heart. The words lose none of their truth for being familiar, worn smooth like worry beads. But it's the rhythm that, for me, most conveys the experience of loss. The shifts in meter, the lines thudding abruptly short, the pauses—this is how time and meaning slip around you, as though on badly uneven gears.

To keep this at least semi-relevant to Notebook Thursday, I will add that Dickinson scholars have identified several different dashes in her handwriting. They're variously rendered as em dashes or spaced en dashes in print, though she may have intended a distinct meaning or sound for each. The Dickinson Archive has images of her handwritten pages, though none of them are loading at present (and I've tried! with two gadgets and three browsers! so I do not imagine that link will help anyone!). But an image search can still pull up the last stanza, at least. The dashes there are sharp little penstrokes surrounded by wide spaces. I wonder if those are the serrated breaths of grief, the vast empty pauses of incredulity.

Vanessa Chan recently started a Twitter thread inviting writers to share "the most chaotic thing" about their writing practices. I don't know that I can rank that chaotic-ness of my practices—writing is innately chaotic, writing in multiple forms more so, starting longhand almost perversely so—but I replied with the one that would be most likely to baffle an uninitiated reader. I often work in a cramped, narrow column down the side of the page, continuing down the outside of the other page across the spread. Later I come back and write in the middle parts of the spread. It results in pages that look like a ragged teacher's edition, with stories meandering down the margins and (often) day-to-day journal content in the middle:

1. This method of fishing for lyrics by singing nonsense syllables is a time-tested yet mysterious tradition. John Linnell of They Might Be Giants described it thusly in a recent podcast interview: "A lot of ideas come from the sounds of the syllables of the words... You usually start with a melody, and then the melody suggests a set of syllables that work with those particular notes... Often, you let the song write itself in that way."
2. Dated October 20, 2020, as it happens. There’s something to say for writing longhand, and I probably was more prolific when I carried a Moleskine around for song ideas, but it is sort of nice to be able to go back and see revisions automatically.
3. It would have been nice to include this as a nod to Gilbert O’Sullivan, but it was not to be.
4. Changed in the final draft to “it’s been a real good time.” a line whose grammar would not impress Dorothy Zbornak, but included as a nod to “Real Cool Time” by Ramones and “Real Real Good Time” by Parasites.
5. I’m not sure whether to call this bit a bridge or a chorus. Actually, I think what I have been referring to as “verses” here could be a variation on what Andy Partridge calls a “vhorus” – a hybrid of a verse and a chorus which prominently features the title line.

[posted on a Friday, a week late, after the damn site ate the entire post]

There's this predictable phenomenon that happens every time a legislative or judicial shift threatens reproductive rights. It started happening last week on Twitter and has made it to Facebook by now. People talk about their abortions—especially the terminations of wanted but life-threatening pregnancies, but also the terminations of pregnancies resulting from rape or abusive relationships—laying their trauma bare in public to demonstrate why reproductive rights are necessary. And I get the reasoning behind it. But I also question its effectiveness as a tactic. The minority who want to ban abortion are manifestly not moved by the pain of pregnant people.

Silvia Federici, who has written extensively about the correlation between reproductive restrictions and the rise of colonial capitalism, also discusses the way Enlightenment beliefs were complicit in justifying this oppression. Descartes, she notes, was convinced that animals, lacking reason, could not feel pain. He thus performed a number of vivisections without any pangs of conscience.

Which is to say: showing that you're suffering is not always enough to convince your oppressors and tormentors to stop oppressing and tormenting you, especially when they have a vested interest in ignoring your pain.

I mention this because it's a mistake I've made as a lyricist a few times. My default reaction, when legislation threatens, seems to be to write a tragic protest song. "South Dakota Blues" is a representative title, and no, I will not be posting that notebook page here; it's a horrible song, humorless and heavy, trying for tragedy and landing instead on melodrama. In short: trying to lay bare the pain of a pregnant protagonist for a world that is manifestly unmoved by pain.

So then: how does a good song about abortion work? 

"Brick" is one of the first that comes to mind. I would say it works in much the same way as "Hills Like White Elephants"—by not actually mentioning abortion directly. "The Freshman" is another one that never mentions it directly; apparently plenty of listeners don't know that's what the song is about. "Sally's Pigeons" is more direct (it mentions the back alley), but still firmly in the tragic mode (Sally dies).  Sad, oblique literary melancholy. It works for these songs—I don't think it's necessarily a bad way to tell these stories—but why is this the only way we tell them?

What I am getting at, I guess, is that I am looking now for a song that works differently, and particularly one that doesn't paint abortion solely as a woman's problem. Because pain and tragedy are clearly insufficient as activism, and if people keep feeling they have no choice but to publicize their trauma I will just go numb with mute fury. It's a whole person who gets pregnant—not a walking womb—and that's a person with the full range of feelings, not just Oh No Sad Tragedy. Sometimes abortion isn't tragic at all. Sometimes it's not that big a deal. Sometimes it sucks, but it's the right call. But! Also! There's an unspoken story of reproductive rights to every song about getting it on, getting off, meeting someone's eyes across the room, saying hi like a spider to a fly, having your back against the record machine, being all right in a kind of a limited way for an off night. The flamboyant sexual freedom of rock and pop music is entirely—and silently—dependent on reproductive healthcare. I'm looking for the songs that acknowledge that. And if I can't find them, I have to figure out how to write one.

At the last Baguettes session, we took a break for pie (as we do) and fell into a discussion about songwriting. We've collaborated on songwriting in the past, just not for this band. Maybe because it started as my side project, incorporating the personnel of the Loudness War? Maybe because I like to work from a thematic sense of a whole album? I dunno. But it makes sense to collaborate more. We work in different ways (starting from music, starting from lyrics, seat-of-the-pants improvising), and if you do it right, that combination of approaches can be a strength.

But also: If you've been writing songs solo for years, and if you are the sort of person who puts everything through several drafts before sharing it with anyone, opening up the process can be terrifying.

So that's fun.  

Eventually the desire to complete a stalled backlog of songs overcame the cringe factor. I went through my past few notebooks and pulled lyrics I liked, and combined them into a Google Doc. I didn't insert page breaks between ideas. Instead there's a little row of hyphens, like this:
---
—because sometimes you get lyrics at separate times without realizing they're part of the same song. Seeing them sharing a screen can help. I saved it as St. Jerome's Charitable Home for Orphaned & Misbegotten Lyrics—Jerome being the patron of both orphans and libraries—and shared it with the band.

Here's what I've learned so far:

1. Culling lyrics for people whose opinions you value is a really good exercise. You don't want to waste their time. (Especially Charlie's.) 
2. The act of typing things into an unwonted format helped me figure out a couple of things almost immediately. The first thing I typed was a couplet-chorus combination I've been kicking around since my last summer in Asheville, always feeling like the chorus was a weird letdown for that particular verse. Not until seeing it in the doc did I realize it was actually two songs, setting up different promises (and premises). As soon as I split them up, I figured out new verses for each one and spotted the marginal note that would become the real chorus for song #1. 
3. Sharing the document, with all its stupid vulnerability, has cracked something open in a process that has been blocked for a year. It might be too soon to say exactly how it has changed the process; it's certainly too soon to judge the results. But it feels as though I'm approaching songs with better focus and steadier work than before.
4. I'm used to the way my day-gig editorial teams work in shared docs. Bandmates generally do not insert comments replying to your comments or querying "Errata?" or noting an inconsistency. It took several days before I realized this was not a referendum on my work.
5. I have been misquoting this Simpsons line for years:

I put "Three Walls Are Not Enough" at the top of the document. WRONG. SO WRONG. In my defense, my version provides important context; in songwriting, three is often exactly enough, so the correct quote might have been misleading. But my conscience might feel better if I added an "Errata?"