Notebook Thursday: Absolution (a work in progress)

I've been thinking a lot this summer, unsurprisingly, about apologies and absolution. Who gets them, who doesn't; the power dynamics of forgiveness; the gestures and actions of atonement; the apologies I should have made, the ones I shouldn't, the ones I'll never get, the ones that still haunt me.

The meditation is turning into a sort of Aimee Mann–ish ballad. I like it a lot so far, though there are some significant gaps in the lyrics, and I barely have verses at all.

In the larger scope of the year's songwriting, there are two basic styles duking it out. More and more I think that I'm working on two albums, not one. The themes feel too disparate to belong in the same place. I seem to have to write a certain number of country/roots songs in order to write a similar number of pop/rock songs. (This happened with Highway Gothic too, though we only recorded the one album that time; there are still a number of unrecorded compositions from that process. Of the ones that made it onto the album, "The Age and the Ache" and "White Flag" were the closest to the country/roots feel.) For now, I'm thinking of the roots collection as Backroads, and the pop—or whatever it is—as Posthistoric​.