As a rule I approach learning a new piece with a stubborn optimism that may border on quixotic. I may be a lousy sightreader, I may have to work through one measure a day, but I will work, and I will keep working. So it's noteworthy when I try something and conclude that it is permanently beyond my abilities.

In high school, my piano teacher gave me a transcript of Gershwin's performance of "The Man I Love." I have fairly long hands—I can span a tenth—but I could not physically get my fingers onto all the notes Gershwin was hitting. I haven't seen anything about the size of Gershwin's hands; I don't know if it was a Rachmaninoff situation. But I do remember sitting on the piano bench in baffled defeat. And I wonder now if he was playing things that seemed obvious to him because they were within his abilities: notes and graces that would never occur to the mere mortals who are just focusing on correctly rolling from the bottom to the top of a twelfth.

Bach has been a constant of the pandemic for me. A month or two ago I started working on a guitar setting of the cello suite everyone knows, using the same measure-by-measure approach I've used for Well-Tempered Clavier. It quickly became evident that the piece was going to make me a better guitarist, forcing me to focus on clean note releases and careful left-hand placement. And the stretches—whew. In several measures the index finger is on the third fret while the pinky reaches to the seventh, a span that is, if not overtly rude, certainly not the most standard in rock.* (The performance in that link uses a different arrangement from the one I've been using, relying on open strings and less-stretchy fingerings in ways that honestly might make more sense. But arrangers usually have their reasons, so I'm sticking to this one unless it becomes truly Gershwin-level prohibitive.) 

My pinkies are a little hyperextensive, and sometimes the top joint will lock in a way that probably protects a tendon but absolutely does not help with guitar. So I tend not to use the left pinky much in melodic play, giving the important notes to the more reliable ring finger. It turns out that—like any other dang body part—the pinky gets stronger when you exercise it regularly. The "White Flag" bassline is my usual gauge for whether my left hand is in performance shape; reader, it is so easy right now.

What has surprised me, though, is how much this has opened up other songs. I am not typically a riff-based songwriter, but as pinky movement has become more natural, several riffs have just sort of— appeared and offered themselves, as vocal melodies do. The notes and graces have become obvious. I am trying to live up to them. One became the lead-up to the chorus in "C'est la guerre"—I think it works?—and the others may or may not cohere into full songs. I don't really have a method for working this way; I have to figure that out too.

Anyway. I have been thinking about the intersection between playing and songwriting, and the ways performance shapes the body in turn. It's a given in acting and dance, but for some reason—despite the permanent quarter-inch of callus on my fingertips—I haven't thought about it so much in music. I don't have any big conclusions yet. Except of course it reshapes you, of course it changes you. So does everything worth doing.

*It does happen a bit more in classical guitar, where there are warmups devoted to achieving the four-fret stretch, but as my guitar background is not at all classical, this has been quite the learning curve.**
**Charlie's not the only one who can do footnotes!

I posted a few weeks ago about starting a wall of sticky notes in the name of writing...something. Since then the number of notes has increased, but the final form remains elusive. I'm certain there's at least one lyric here. Other things may be poems? Hard to say.

Even if I don't know much about the product, I think I've figured out a few things about the process.

First, the habit of noting odd ideas or phrases is an old one; many of these would normally have gone into my lyric notebook (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have written in there less since starting this). When I was writing more prose, these might have found their way into background descriptions.

Second, whereas ideas in the notebook often vanish, these persist, since I see them every day as I work. I don't actually know if that's good. They gain a sense of inevitability this way—and although you want that in a lyric, it should come from the lyric's strength, not your own overfamiliarity. Ideas in the notebook have to fight harder to claim a part of my attention. They wind up culling themselves that way. These gain profundity by position.

Third, I notice that I actively look for phrases to include as I go through my day. As when I joined friends for collaborative poetry projects—a sonnet line exchange, a haiku notebook passed back and forth—the world seems to come alive with details and words. This I love: the reminder that the ability to notice is, more than anything else, a choice. (And whew, does that remind me of the sheer number of chaotic, abandoned writing experiments with which my past is littered.)

Where does it all go? I don't know. In cleaning out my office I just found an ancient sticky note, adhesive caked with grit, on which I had written Today I will practice calm. (Erm. That worked.) The transient nature of sticky notes probably means you shouldn't take them too seriously.

Postscript: I just read the NYT piece on creativity, and the footer recommended this one, with its photo of a Post-It wall, from 2014. I don't know what that juxtaposition means either.

Ryan (of the Unswept) keeps threatening to write about the Lawnmower Theory of Songwriting, which posits that you'll come up with your best ideas when your hands are otherwise occupied and you have no way to write anything down. I rarely find myself mowing, but quite a few songs have presented themselves while I ride my bike. It's possible we need a bit of resistance to figure out which ideas are strong.

I found the first draft of "Got Lucky" this week, and decided to post it here because—though I remembered that the song needed revision—I had forgotten it was such a mess. This shows just how much I had to throw away to arrive at the final version.

At upper right is the chorus. If you read music, you might notice that the notes against the D and Bm chords aren't the recorded melody—they're the harmony that Charlie sings. I kept jumping up to the F# when I played the song, and it took a while to figure out that it wasn't actually a mistake. (Charlie says "Alone Again Or" developed this way too.) 

The early verses I might as well have ripped out of the notebook entirely. ("No one ever swept me up / They always swiped away"? Eesh.) At top left are a bunch of rhymes I didn't use. A little lower is the part where I realized I'd accidentally plagiarized a rhyme from "9 to 5." On the right things get Westerberg-ish with "All they ever took from me was everything I owned," which might be worth using in some other song. At the bottom is "They'll tell you there's a lid for every pot / That's how you know you've lost the plot." Which I don't hate, but perhaps ought to. Anyway, it's not in the final song.

The page was crowded enough with competing ideas that I had to start a new one. Every so often it happens that way. I used a different notebook—bigger, with more white space—and copied only the lines I was pretty sure I wanted to keep. I filled in the other stuff later (which you can tell, since the ink color is different). And this version, too, had a couple of things that didn't take.

Things I kept from the first draft: 

1. The title
2. The bridge (still my favorite part)
3. The chord progression
4. The lyrics for the first verse (which you can tell was a late-breaking idea, by the way it's wedged into the space in the gutter of the first notebook)

Even the bottom version isn't final, because it doesn't have the false Bm ending—that was a suggestion from Charlie the first time I brought it to the whole band. Every so often, finishing a song takes a level of persistence that verges on foolhardy. It's kind of fitting that it happened with this one, a song about striking gold after years of striking out.

​The Unswept will play "Got Lucky" in their April 23 set at International Pop Overthrow, Montrose Saloon, Chicago.

Several songs are at a point where it would be lethal to discuss their processes instead of working on them directly, so instead here's a quick roundup of ideas that have been feeding into my creative process of late:

• Elisa Gabbert in the NYT Book Review on what poetry is and isn't
• Josh Terry on AI in music, with a killer quote from Nick Cave (and a nod to a great Emmylou Harris/Delbert McClinton song)​
• Austin Kleon on curiosity
• Ted Gioia on the Orphic quest
• Anne Helen Peterson on various lives in art

Things are chaotic enough this spring that an interesting pastiche might result from the chaos itself. Yesterday there were several phrases banging around in my head without any sort of clear form or creative imperative. I wrote them on sticky notes with a brush pen (a Pentel, another Austin Kleon recommendation for slowing down and focusing thoughts) and put them on the wall over my desk. I'm going to keep adding to the assembly and see what sorts of meanings arise from the new juxtapositions as the words become detached from their original contexts. (Part of me feels it's necessary to describe this process here just in case I die suddenly: to the uninitiated eye, this could easily look like some sort of terrifying conspiracy-theory psychotic break. I swear it's just art.)

I would be remiss not to discuss actual baguettes on this blog at some point. I usually opt for pain d'epi, the wheat-ear loaf—same recipe, more crust, easier sharing.

I can't take any credit for the recipe; it's the one in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Bread flour, yeast, water, salt. That's it: four ingredients. It does have to be bread flour, not all-purpose. And I might go a little heavy on the salt, but that scarcely counts as a modification. 

One thing I have figured out, though, is that you can use the flat side of a cast iron griddle as a baking stone. (Lodge has "use it in the oven" right there in the product description, so this is hardly groundbreaking kitchen science on my part.) This approach, in combination with a steam tray, yields the most perfect crusts I ever hope to achieve.

When we shared a lineup with Underwire in 2019, they brought cupcakes for the audience, as part of their band tradition. Should we start doing this with baguettes? 

Earlier this week, I flipped back through my notebook to find a song I started in January. (I put it aside so I could deal with, among other things, catastrophic car failure: I am now absolutely primed to work on country music.) I found it, and the main lyric and its melody came back immediately—always a good sign—but at the top of the page is the note "Old 97s-ish."

Uh-oh.

I have written this note at the top of more than one draft ("Okay Okay" among the new songs, "Candy" among older ones). The trouble is that the Old 97s have the ability to write songs that seem familiar on the first listen. And songwriting, regardless of genre, often feels as though I'm trying to recall something I've heard distantly—less I Am a Camera than I Am an Imperfect Radio.  So when I work in a form that's supposed to feel like a pair of broken-in jeans, and there's a clear point of reference, I start to get nervous about how much I'm actually writing myself, and how much I'm straight-up lifting from others: whether it feels familiar because I'm working well in the genre, or because it is familiar.

​At such times it's useful to remember that I have a bandmate with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of rock and pop. If I can finish the thing, I trust Charlie will let me know if it veers too close to any existing song.

I guess the anxiety of influence is the unintentional theme of the week. Perhaps I should not ever pretend that I have any idea what I'm doing.

How many modifications can you make to something before you get to claim credit? It's a complicated question in the arts (and a wretched legal issue for musicians). It doesn't seem much clearer in the world of recipes. In general, I believe in stealing like an artist. But owning up to the theft in writing, in public, seems nearly as stupid as leaving your wallet at the bank you've just robbed.

Which is to say, this recipe didn't start with me. I got it from a bag of Ghirardelli chocolate chips, and then made a number of changes. Somewhere along the way, the modified version became my default cookie recipe, to the point that friends started referring to them as The Cookies.

So: Start with Clementine's Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies.

But then:
1. Use bittersweet chocolate (60–70% cacao), not semisweet. 
2. Skimp a little on the sugar and brown sugar.
3. Add a pinch of cardamom to the dry ingredients.
4. Use salted butter (the original recipe doesn't specify, but a lot of sweet bakes call for unsalted).
5. Replace the walnuts with dried Montmorency cherries.

I usually cut the recipe in half, which means 6. I make it with an egg white, not a whole egg.

Does this mean I can claim it? I doubt it. I think we're still in cover-song territory, but the sort of cover where you have to listen for a minute to be sure.