It's been a week of Broken Things, so in lieu of a complete song, here's a lyric that hasn't found a home yet. A counterpart, I guess, to the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

(I think this might actually fit in one of the current songs in progress? But if I try to record a demo this week I will probably wind up electrocuting myself.)

Here's the original draft of "The Age and the Ache," which took a bit of rearranging before it settled into its final form. 

Typically I jot down the first idea for a lyric on the recto page. Then, later, I can leaf through the notebook and see if anything grabs me. The first idea for this song was the pair of lyrics that turned into the verse motif, "You pretend you're free / I'll pretend I'm beautiful." That's pretty much the essence of the song, and most of the lyrics followed pretty quickly (which you can tell from the fact that they're mostly in the same color of ink).

I use curly brackets to mark words and phrases when I think they need revision, or I can't choose between several similar phrasings, or I'm not sure about keeping the line. It's a handy way to keep writing without stopping to fuss over minutiae. I was gunning hard for "really and truly alone" here, but it's bracketed twice, and it never made it in.

On the verso page you can see the tab of the riff—which I think Charlie plays a little differently with the slide, and which we replaced with accordion in the final recording—and my frustrated attempt at working out the correct music-theory name of a chord in the chorus. Still not sure I ever arrived at the correct name, to be honest. 

Songs rarely arrive neatly, at least not for me. ("Like" did, and I almost resent it for that: it makes every other writing process seem proportionally harder.) "Posthistoric" took multiple tries, across two notebooks, with months elapsing between the initial idea and the finished song.

There are almost always a lot of early lines that don't make it to the final song. Sometimes you have to write an idea down to figure out that it doesn't belong. I had forgotten that this draft included a reference to the Loudness War.

People tend to assume that I have some great overarching System of Ink Color. I do always have a lot of different-colored pens around: my day gigs involve (or used to involve) a lot of proofreading on hard-copy layouts; in rehearsals, I try to color-code my line and blocking notes by day, so I can tell at a glance which ones are the most recent. In the music notebooks, though, a change in ink color just means I started the song, stalled out, and happened to grab a different pen when I came back to it later.  

The "URL" line that ends the recording appeared on its own at least a year ago, with no attached idea for a song. I thought for a while that it might just wind up being a stand-alone joke in the liner notes. In this song, it's still a little detached from the rest, but...well, if it doesn't belong in this song, it doesn't belong anywhere.

Below is a verse I couldn't use (though I did put the Joyce quote at the top of the lyrics on Bandcamp). I always tell myself I'm saving such things for later. It's rarely true. But I do love the image of some future historian tracing thoughts in the embossed lines of a rollerball point on a seemingly blank scrap of paper.

I was all about using the lockdown to focus on technical skills and songwriting. Then a kitchen accident on July 4 almost cost me part of a fingertip on my fret hand. So there hasn't been much guitar in the past week. (I think the finger is going to be okay, though it still looks and feels kind of gnarly.)

BUT that means I've been able to dig in on things like lyric videos for our back catalogue of songs. If you're the sort of listener who cares whether it's "fingernails and cigarettes" or "bacon and cigarettes" that make a lousy dinner (and you probably are, or you wouldn't be reading this), then head on over to our YouTube channel to find out whether the words to "Slinky" are really as nonsensical as they seem. (They are.) 

Another big music-adjacent project for the year is illustrating The ABCs of Rock, written by fellow musician Randy Diederrich. It's due out in December. We'll make some of the images available as prints and greeting cards. (Send them to the musicians in your life. They're all sad right now.) If I can't play much for a while...at least I can envision a monster metal session involving Lemmy, Vernon Reid, Doro Pesch, Tony Iommi, and Dave Lombardo.

Until next time, wear your mask, wash your hands, and stay safe.