Lots of songs in progress, nothing quite ready to share. Some things I have found inspiring of late:

• Claire Vaye Watkins's essay "On Pandering" (which I encountered via Men Yell at Me). This gets at a lot of reasons I needed to take a break from writing literary fiction (after, like Watkins, being told my prose was "masculine"). And the clarion call at the end made me yell in agreement: "Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white fucks at Oxford."
• Austin Kleon's musing on middle life. I've linked to Kleon plenty before; this piece is especially lovely, and his Substack is very much worth the subscription. 
• Van Gogh's advice to a young artist (I think this also came my way via a Substack, though now I am no longer sure which one).
• Ted Gioia's enjoyable, if occasionally inadvertent, resistance to AI.
• For the sake of linking to something that isn't a Substack, I'll note that one of my guitar mentors recommends dipping into Songwriters on Songwriting whenever you need a new way of looking at things.
• The Baguettes have had a few recording sessions lately in which we've referred to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. Also of use: the Not So Oblique Strategies. I don't know whether it's the result of any official strategy, but last week saw us discussing whether we could incorporate a typewriter into our live percussion setup.

And it's hot. This room is so humid the trackpad on my geriatric laptop has stopped working. The world is melting, and I hope you're engaging in whatever forms of climate action you can, large and small. That's the real point of all of this: let's get rid of what isn't working, and let's make something better. 

I’m not sure there’s any way to talk about it without getting a bit mystical, but sometimes with music there’s a feeling that the songs are already out there, floating about through the universe, and you must make yourself available to hear them. Not always; there are a lot of different ways to write songs. But sometimes. Especially, for me, after some time of not writing much—I tend to need some sort of ritual reconnection (or recommitment) to the practice, and it always feels then as though I’m listening to something I have been ignoring.

So when I set off on a road trip last week, I told myself I wouldn’t listen to music at first. I would let myself drive unaccompanied and listen to what the silence had to tell me.

Plenty, as it turned out. Construction on the Kennedy slowed things down enough that I could take notes for a while (and I’m sure the driver in front of me thought I was furiously taking down their plate number; if there’s a genial-looking way to take notes in the car while attending to traffic, I haven’t found it). But after I got out of the city, I had to rely on memory, singing riffs and lines over to myself and trying to fix them in my brain until the next rest stop. Because the songs just kept coming. A chorus for a song I’ve been trying to write since Taos. A fix for one whose verses have never quite pleased me. A baseline for an Unswept song from a couple of weeks ago. It was as though they had all been waiting for me: they crowded into the car. I wound up driving all the way to Cleveland without playing music.

A less mystical way to say it might just be that when your life gets cluttered and difficult, you have to clear some space for the things you choose to care about. I find I don’t want to be entirely unmystical, though. There is something a little scary and holy about communing with silence; that’s why we so often avoid it, and that’s why we need it.

Work hard. Get tired. Repeat. Some days I’m not sure there’s much more to songwriting that that.

I used to have this postcard from Found Image Press taped up over my desk. Sometime in the past couple of years it slipped down behind a stack of notebooks. But I just found it again, around the same time that Austin Kleon posted this discussion of Paul McCartney's process. One of the main points is that Paul and John followed Paul's father's advice, which he shortened to "D.I.N." In Paul's words, "you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through." Equally important was the principle that once they sat down to work, they kept going until they had something.

Plenty can be said—and has been—for deadlines as a motivator, especially if you tend to put off creative work. (Fewer people seem to know about a study that found that a stressful deadline can actually lower your creativity for a couple of days post-project, creating what the authors called a "pressure hangover.") However, I think it's important that the D.I.N. approach, as applied by John and Paul, isn't exactly a deadline. Rather, it works like an improv game: it operates on the agreement that whatever happens here and now will be our material for now. That opens the door to spontaneity and play—which of course you can hear in the best of the Lennon-McCartney catalogue—and it yields a fantastic, if paradoxical, combination of urgency and low stakes.

My favorite music theory teacher once referred to Mozart as an essentially improvisational composer, a description that explains both his melodies and the volume of his work. You can recognize that a-ha spontaneity in many of his songs, and if you've ever sung his vocal pieces, you've had a delightful sense of discovering places your voice wants to go anyway. A lot of McCartney melodies feel the same way.

I suppose I'm coming to terms with the fact that I haven't been writing as much music as I'd like. I've made notes and starts, and then put them off, and put them off, and put them off. (There has been a whole lot of life happening, so it isn't entirely my fault, but still.) Earlier this week I pieced together some ideas—a song that has taken so long that bits of it are in three different notebooks—and sat down to "steamroll through." I didn't get it done done, but I made more progress than I have in a while. Perhaps more importantly, it seemed to throw open the door to other work—the opposite of a pressure hangover!—and by last night I had two new demos.

I'm going to find a new place for the postcard.