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Notebook Thursday: Milestone Songs

3/14/2023

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Notebook Thursday tends to focus on our own compositions, but today I'm thinking about the songs that shaped how I play guitar, and by extension how I write on guitar. Here are a few, in a short series of firsts.

First guitar: Little Girl, a Gibson LG0 from my mom's friend's garage sale. It was a perfect bargain: she didn't know what she was selling, and I didn't know what I was buying. Soon after, I got one of those guitar magazines that tabs out popular songs. I was in way, way over my head. But one of the songs in there was simple enough that I could muddle through. It was "What's Up" (it was the 90s, after all). For a lot of people, it's a karaoke default; for me, it's the first exposure to suspended chords. Joni Mitchell calls them "chords of inquiry...chords that [have] a question mark in them." I still like them a lot. 

"Something": the first song that made me understand elegance in songcraft. (We spent some time analyzing it in Charles Kim's theory/composition class at Old Town School, which I can't recommend highly enough.) The descending line within the chord progression is gorgeous, of course, but it's also incredibly playable. For a guitarist, the song is about as intuitive as it gets, with each chord placement growing naturally out of the previous one. There are plenty of songs that use variations on this structure (Dylan uses it in "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and "Make You Feel My Love"), but this was the one that cracked it open for me. Without it, I'd never have written "Let Me Love You"—which is just about due for an updated recording with the full band.

I started listening to Big Star because they were important to the artists who mattered to me, and a couple of their songs turned into milestones. "Thirteen": first time fingerpicking and singing at the same time. (I was wrong on several of the chords, as I learned much later when I joined Butterbean to perform it at one of the Alex Chilton birthday shows.) "Ballad of El Goodo": knocked me over when I first heard it, even as I knew that it was beyond my abilities then. So reaching a point where I could play it comfortably counts as...sort of a long-delayed first, maybe? It unlocked other songs for me—for example, the four-note motif nested in the progression of the "Hold on, hold on" section is pretty close to the four-note motif nested in the chorus of "I Will Dare." 

There are others, of course; maybe I'll write about them some Thursday. They'd make an odd, chaotic playlist. You don't get to pick your revelations. 
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Notebook Thursday: Whither the Notebooks?

11/3/2022

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Pocket-sized staff-paper notebooks, as I noted in my last post, have become rather difficult to find. Both Moleskine and Roterfaden seem to have discontinued their offerings. I went on the hunt for some new options, and over the next few months I'll try these out.

The Unemployed Philosophers Guild has some that look like Schirmer sheet music, which is cute. But they seem overpriced, and several decades of well-intentioned gifts have convinced me that I can't write in gift-shop journals. So I am not including these in my trial. 
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First up is the pocket-size N&J Musician Notebook. The paper is decent, the staves are printed on both recto and verso, and there's a good number of pages; this one comes closest to the Moleskine/Roterfaden proportions. Drawback: it's perfect bound, so you can't open it and have the pages lie flat. 
Bärenreiter offers these in colors such as Liszt Blue and Beethoven Aubergine, which are probably already indie band names. They're thin, 16 spreads each, so they will actually fit in a pocket or an instrument case; unfortunately, that page count probably means I will complete one song per notebook. The lines on the right are wide rule (BOOO).
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These ones are variously described as Henle (front cover) and Hal Leonard (back sticker). Chaos! The musty faded blue has a vintage-schoolroom feel that I quite like. (Maybe not quite as charming as the fragile vellum wrapped around each new red-stamped Roterfaden insert, but what is?) Inside, both the recto and the verso have staff paper. I suspect these are going to become my favorites, which probably means they're next in line to be discontinued. Stock up now!
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Notebook Thursday: Time

10/20/2022

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One of the more frustrating aspects of writing anything is that sometimes you have to put it aside and wait for a while. Combine that with a day job and other obligations, and it's very easy to look up and find that a year has passed and you're no closer to writing the thing.

I am also a bit prone to what I've heard described as time blindness, in which the past seems much nearer than it actually is and I am often unaware of how much time has really elapsed. (If you're one of the poor folks to whom I have an owed an email for months or years, I promise you are still present in my thoughts and the overdue communication causes excruciating amounts of guilt.) So there is a balance to strike between "enough time for perspective" and "not so much that the pause lasts forever." I flail at it far more often than I strike it.

Case in point: this post, which—according to the surrounding dates in my notebook—I started writing on September 2.

But I did finish a music notebook in the interim, which provided a useful opportunity for going back through and harvesting the ideas I like. The amount of time required to fill a notebook* is usually adequate for perspective. If an idea doesn't stand out when I go back through the pages, it's probably not a great idea. Most of them aren't, after all. It looks as though I've flagged about 10 percent of the pages here, which doesn't account for the pages where I've already finished the song or posted the lyrics to St. Jerome's Charitable Home for group development. So in this review, I'm probably erring on the side of generosity.
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Harvesting is also good for juxtaposition—finding seemingly disparate ideas, from different moments, that turn out to be related. This week, two or three of these flags came together into one song I'm hoping to demo tonight. Old heartbreaks merge together into something new. Time does that too.
​
*The amount of time required to fill a notebook differs by notebook—the Roterfadens have fewer pages than the much-lamented Moleskines did—but it's in the ballpark of twelve months. Roterfaden seems to have discontinued its pocket-size staff-paper notebooks, though, and my stash is not going to last forever, so the time between idea and harvest is going to go through another forced shift. (Does 
anyone make a pocket staff notebook any more?)
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Notebook Thursday: Block

7/21/2022

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My fiction professor used to quote Isaac Bashevis Singer:
There is no such thing as writer's block, only writer's inhibitions.
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.
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Notebook Thursday: The Well-Tempered Clavier

6/30/2022

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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:
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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.
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Notebook(ish) Thursday: Quatrains

6/23/2022

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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:
Better to live as a rogue and a bum,
   a lover all treat as a joke,
to hang out with a crowd of comfortable drunks,
   than crouch in a hypocrite's cloak.

Unless you can dance through a common bar
   with a vagabond's step, you're not going to make it.
This is the road of the reckless who gamble
   their lives; risk yours, or you're not going to make it.
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Notebook Thursday: Jokes

6/16/2022

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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.
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Notebook Whatever Day It Is: Em Dash

6/10/2022

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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.
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Notebook Thursday: St. Jerome Success Stories (Guest Post)

6/2/2022

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Thomas Zeitner is one-fifth of the Baguettes and one-fourth of the Loudness War. Scott Tribble is his longtime songwriting partner.

Songwriting is already hard, and everyone does it differently. Collaborative songwriting is the art of dropping two unique processes on top of each other and hoping they mesh. I’ve had the most success co-writing with Scott Tribble, published author/rhythm guitarist. We played together in a band that went through multiple names and roster changes, a la Spinal Tap, from 2000 to 2007. Scott moved out of state, but wanted to keep writing, so we would meet for the odd weekend to try recording new material.


You need to devote serious time to collaboration. Our songwriting sessions were mostly periods of throat-clearing and empty space, while we waited for our brains to hit the same record groove. One thing we had to our advantage was that we had different strengths. Scott’s end was arrangement. Mine was lyrics. We basically pitched half-formed ideas until something lit up on the other side. It works, but it takes a long time for the flint to spark. Not everyone writes “Get Back” on a smoke break.

“Make It Home Alive” had two sonic parents: an orphaned, Gin Blossoms-style chorus that came to me while practicing, and a melody line that Scott had recorded and sent to me, like a voice memo.  Both were at least a year old when we got together in 2008 to record what we labeled the "Tap Sessions." Looking at what we demo’ed that weekend, it was a productive session, but I remember feeling we were losing steam toward the end. Time was of the essence, since logistically our in-person collaborations were few and far between. It might be why Scott decided to revisit his existing melody line (labeled “Honesty” in my iTunes). 

I had heard that piece dozens of times, especially because I played all of his tracks in anticipation of the weekend. But there was nothing there until that moment. I overuse the metaphor of fires of creation, but I promise you, dear reader: on a good day, songwriting is more light than sound. And the room was glowing.

The melody repeats itself a little, which inspired an internal rhyme. “Your dad’s saying that you tricked him. Your mom’s playing the victim/But it’s all a trap for you.” Great. Now we had half a verse. All I needed is another internal rhyme and something that rhymes with “you.” Easy.

Scott, meanwhile, saw that I had something, and was willing to just play the same four chords over and over until I figured it out. “We did nothing ‘gainst the law but I’m the only one they saw/So I’m going to take the rap for you.” There’s a good chance that we might have stalled out there, but Scott was playing in A major, which gave me a segue to the chorus I already had in my pocket. I just needed to slow it down to the mellow tempo, which had an alt-country vibe—like a Wilco or Old 97s ballad.

“It’s all right. It’s okay. It’s better it happened this way/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive./You can call the police. They couldn’t catch a disease/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive.” I sang, muttering chord changes to Scott in between words.  After two hours of nothing, we had one third of a song written in about two minutes. It only took a year!

We paused long enough for me to write everything down. (I’m pretty sure “gainst” was a deliberate choice from the very beginning but there’s a lot of editing on the fly.) It was a strong template. Unless we did something really bizarre for a bridge, the piece was four chords total. Scott kept playing. His part was done. Now we were just painting the house.

I focused on the ambiguity of the first verse. It evoked rumors and innuendo. Details would only pin down two unnamed souls who already had enough working against (‘gainst) them. I somewhat regret using “we’re not here and we’re not proud” as it’s more explicit than anything else in the song. Is “Make It Home Alive” about coming out in a very conservative community? Yes. It’s also about abortion rights, manslaughter, and John Grisham’s “The Client.” The salient issue is that young people have problems they’re not prepared for.
 
Even with internal rhyming, ABCB is one of the most forgiving schemes to write within. The rest of the lyrics were finished in less than an hour.  We recorded a rough, ROUGH demo, adding some country-fried lead fills to temporarily cover some of the musical gaps. The song was much slower than the chorus I started with, and it’s apparent when I hear myself trying to hold a melancholy note long enough. Rough performance aside, it’s a solid song, and a great example of collaboration as a synthesis of two parts.

At some point, we remotely re-recorded it in a faster "Hey Jealousy" style, with me valiantly and painstakingly adding GarageBand drumbeats to propel the song. But it definitely needed the energy of a full band together in the same room. I eventually started a new project in Chicago and brought the song to the group as something that our guitarist Charlie could sing. We maintained the faster tempo, and it worked beautifully. Our original country weeper was no more, but, hey, we can always include it when we release our Basement Tapes, right?
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Notebook Thursday: Margins, Brackets, Tricks

5/27/2022

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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:
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Chaos. (Extra chaotic thanks to this being the first time I've attempted to redact a photo on this phone: this is what it looks like when you find the highlighter before the marker.) (Also I am terrified that some random part of my journal will still be legible somehow, and the incriminating words the rain stops--or whatever—will haunt me forever.) But yes, for some reason, working in the margins turns off the part of my brain that gets scared by the tyranny of the blank page.

Another writer replied, "This is a glorious hack," and until that moment I hadn't thought of it as anything but kind of shameful—like, am I broken? Why can't I just work straight across the page? But process is process, and as long as you're not hurting anyone else, it doesn't matter.


Brackets are another of my longstanding systems, though these are less chaotic. If I'm not sure about a word or phrase, I'll frame it in curly brackets:
   we {flail} for what to do
If I can think of several ways I might say it, I'll write each of those ways in adjacent sets of curly brackets:
   thought I'd spend my life surviving {you} {my life}
If there's something I need to look up—say, for fact-checking or consistency with something established elsewhere in the story—I'll frame it in square brackets:
   born in [1840].

This system lets me write first drafts without turning on the editorial brain—the editorial brain being, obviously, quite useful, but deadly to the flow state of early work. Later I can go back and fix things. If I've written lyrics without having a full melody, the bracketed alternatives are often what suggests some important change or rhythm. (In the top example, flail became fumble to suit the song's rhythm better. In the middle example, from a song I'm finishing up now, both versions of the line appear, framing the rest of the verses.)

Another favorite trick is to change the writing implement. Working in different colors can be useful for tracking the layers of revision, as well as just making certain ideas hit your eye differently. I resorted to crayon once, on a very stuck piece of fiction. (In retrospect, that one should have stayed stuck. I never even tried to publish it. But the crayons did unstick the writing for the day.)

I suppose all of these boil down to interacting with the writing as a physical, tactile thing. Maybe they work because we're all in the process of creating things out of nothing, and the physical form gives me a little more thinginess to work with? I don't know. I only know that keeping it too abstract, too digital, too deletable, does me no favors.
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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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