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.

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!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.