I tend to resist writing too many end-stopped lines; I like enjambment, and I really love rhyming on a nonfinal syllable, so the word breaks across the line break. ("Bourbon Trail" and "Got Lucky" probably push this tendency about as far as it can go in a standard 4/4 rock line, but I'd hate to think I'm done trying.)
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A nice, if unplanned, aspect of the sticky-note wall has been that the combination of note size and brush pen often forces a syllable break, calling attention to the words within words.
Reviewing it for this post, I'm struck by how many of the notes—and particularly how many of the broken words—involve time: WAIT FOR IT; PRECIPICE OF NEXT; HESITATE + HESITATE; TIME'S FOOL; WELCOME TO TIME. That wasn't a conscious theme of this project—it had no conscious theme—but I suppose half the point was to figure out what exactly I was thinking, pull coherence from disparate threads.
One could make the argument—perhaps I'm making it right here!—that in time as in lyrics, the breaks make the meaning. We're all in the same forward press of minutes and seconds and days, but the points at which we stop, startled, are the ones that wind up delineating our lives.
Maybe time is inevitably what you write about in midlife. Certainly you write about it when the album is called Posthistoric, or when a pandemic steals several years of hopes and expectations and a climate crisis threatens to truncate your age. Maybe I'm just noticing it today because a bout of insomnia last night meant that I read Philip Larkin's "Next, Please" at an unholy hour.
One could make the argument—perhaps I'm making it right here!—that in time as in lyrics, the breaks make the meaning. We're all in the same forward press of minutes and seconds and days, but the points at which we stop, startled, are the ones that wind up delineating our lives.
Maybe time is inevitably what you write about in midlife. Certainly you write about it when the album is called Posthistoric, or when a pandemic steals several years of hopes and expectations and a climate crisis threatens to truncate your age. Maybe I'm just noticing it today because a bout of insomnia last night meant that I read Philip Larkin's "Next, Please" at an unholy hour.
None of which is to say the project has yielded a full song yet, or that everything ties together. Two of the notes that have suggested melodies (ECHO, OKAY? and YOU COME OVER LOOKING LIKE A STRANGER) have nothing obvious to do with time—though it lurks below the surface of each one. Maybe the whole point was to startle myself, stop.
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