As a teenager, I spent months drawing with nothing but Sharpie; my art teacher wanted me to get comfortable with not being able to erase. After contour and texture studies, we progressed to working with negative space—that is, defining an object by what's around it. 

I'm working on a song about someone who's not there, and as often happens, the lessons appeared right when I needed them.

Austin Kleon posted this gem about punk artists defining their work by negatives, with a nice quote from David Byrne on how the Talking Heads set out not to do certain things other bands had done. "The only sensible course was to avoid all of it, to strip everything back and see what was left. ...It was mathematics; when you subtract all that unwanted stuff from something, art or music, what do you have left?" Byrne adds that he later moved beyond that approach, "but the dogma provided a place to start."

In a Chicago rock discussion group, someone posted Paul Westerberg's interview with Musician, in which he discusses how artists define themselves in relation to others, whether they're aspiring to be in the in-group or to break away: "It takes a lot of courage to be different but it takes a great deal of hard work to be the same. I think in the end you get the same result but you've got to be what you are." (I've always had the impression that Westerberg had little choice about being different; he's constitutionally perverse. In Trouble Boys he says that if you tell him "White sheet rain," he'll come back with "Black blanket sun.")

What do those things mean for the song? for me as a person? Defining by absence is useful, but there's a point at which it becomes too reductive. What isn't starts to obscure what is and what can be. I was stuck on a refrain of "I won't think about you, I won't think about you" until I figured out that it needed to break so the song could become a whole song, not just an idea. Ultimately the no isn't enough; you need the yes too. Or I do. 

A few weeks ago, to general woe, Café Selmarie announced it would be closing. I've lived a block away for the past eleven years, and being able to wander through Giddings Plaza for a perfect croissant or a cup of veg chili has always been one of the best parts of the neighborhood.

Right after the announcement I took an evening walk down Lincoln. The windows of another restaurant were papered over. The urgent care clinic sent fluorescent light out of what used to be the Brauhaus. By the fountain a familiar cellist was playing a Bach melody I've learned by heart this year. It felt like an elegy for the Square as I have known it, for this whole stretch of my life.

We cling to the illusion of permanence because it provides the even more important illusion of security. Or that's what I told myself as the streetlights came on against a blue twilight.

I moved out last week. This blog is not the place to go into the details, but the past couple of years have been the hardest of my life. Sometimes the difficulty seemed permanent in a way that began to feel secure, which terrified me.

I've left behind the music room where we recorded most of Highway Gothic and a lot of Unswept tracks. The hundred-year-old piano from "Gen X" and "After All" is still in the front room. My sticky-note project is still on the wall; I will collect it at some point, but inevitably pieces will be shuffled and jumbled. It won't be the same. Nothing will. 

Bach is a good choice for an elegy. His music provides a sense of having tapped into a deeper natural order—and I still don't know whether it's an actual natural order or merely the comforting illusion of one, rendered exceptionally well. The cello suite dances on a sharp edge of paradox, offering permanence in a melody, something that vanishes even as you experience it. Perhaps that, in itself, is the natural order.

One of the band’s funnier recent text threads began when Zach got a song stuck in his head and couldn’t remember what it was. He recorded himself singing the melody and sent it to us—truly, this is trust—and we tried our best to identify the thing. Two weeks later, after the thread had delved into Mungo Jerry, Gershwin, the theme from Driving Miss Daisy, Taj Mahal, and so much Randy Newman that Spotify is still tossing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” into my algorithm, he figured it out himself. That’s a long time to be haunted by a song.

Once when I was freelancing at a large marketing agency, a couple of designers spent an afternoon wandering about, disconsolate, singing a motif they couldn’t identify: “Da-duh! DUH! DUH! Do you know what that song is?” Somehow no one did.* (This is perhaps not surprising, as it’s the same office where I once heard an intern confidently define ska as “rock, but with like a blues feel.”)

The ways we remember music—or almost remember it—both fascinate and scare me. Sometimes when you’re writing a song it comes so fast that it feels more like recall than creation. Sometimes it does turn out to be recall, accidental or not, and then you lose a court case. Which makes the songs that come fast more than a little terrifying. You feel as though you’re dealing with music as an elemental force—unless you’re just regurgitating something you heard once in a Walgreens—and for a while you genuinely don’t know which is true. That frantic not-knowing is part of what “Cryptomnesia” is getting at (though that song began as a dream, and to be honest I still don’t know what every last part of it means).

A song I’m almost done with is still in that state, which means I’ve been carrying it around for a week or two while my brain pings between things it might be and pops random melodies into the ol’ mental algorithm. I’ve practiced it for the sake of putting together a demo, and now I can’t tell whether the chord progression feels inevitable because I’m used to it, or because it’s a song that already exists out in the wild. I am probably not going to know until I play it for the band. This too is trust, huh?

*They didn’t ask me—no one ever asks the freelancer—but it was the theme from Carmen.

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.

I'm playing a lot of solo cover-song gigs lately, which means spending a lot of time with other people's music. That's always a great, educational time, as long as you're not stuck in the type of gig where people just want to bellow along to "Sweet Caroline" every night. You can learn so much by finding the gaps between how you think a song goes, how it does go, and how you'd have written it. 

In many ways an acoustic cover is the real test of a song, letting you see whether melody, chords, and lyrics hold up, or whether the original is just coasting on production and performer charisma. (I once persuaded someone of the merits of "I Want It That Way" by playing the Postmodern Jukebox version. By contrast, there are any number of pop hits that I haven't added to my solo set because they turn out to be pretty boring without a big synth surge.)

This past weekend the band had a recording session that consisted mostly of cover songs (and one original so similar to early Dylan structures that it might as well be a cover). I think one definitely worked, a take of the Paul Westerberg/Grandpaboy ballad "Lush and Green" with Charlie on the lead vocal and a lot of harmonies layered in. I'm less convinced about another—still waiting to see how it sounds with a few added tracks. The treatment I initially planned didn't work, and we went in a few goofball directions from there. But these experiments are useful, even if we wind up scrapping the song. It's a nice break to work on songs that aren't mine, especially as I wrestle with the last holdout songs of Posthistoric, some of which have been in the draft stage for a couple of years. Plus, every recording session is an excuse for pie (peach rhubarb this week, not my best work, frankly, but still pie) and hanging out with Charlie and Julie's cats.

We also determined that—if we ever do chuck it all and become an all-cover act—we can play as The Imposter Syndrome. It can join The Pretenderers, Meatwood Flack, Prince and the Lauper, and the rest of the names we probably won't use.

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.)

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.

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.

A creative director at my first day job used to talk fondly of the agency where she'd started out, where designers had a timesheet code they could use for "time spent staring out the window." What she missed was the official recognition—lacking in most workplaces—that creative work demands downtime. Sometimes the brain works best when your attention wanders.

Puttering is the name I tend to give this process; apparently that's the more American word for it. UK usage favors pottering. The OED defines the verb potter as "occupy oneself in a desultory but agreeable manner; move or go about whilst occupied in such a way." The Online Etymology Dictionary adds "be busy in doing little," and notes that it seems to be a frequentative verb, similar to chatter. (Which suggests that fretter might be the verb for pottering with a guitar—if we didn't already have noodle.) It also includes a graph showing that usage of potter is about half what it was in 1800. I wonder how that graph might align with the spread of models of industrial productivity.

I, for one, have not had much time for puttering lately. I miss it, and I'm pretty sure my creative work is suffering for the lack. The sticky-note wall might qualify, since it is fundamentally aimless. But that's no more than a minute or two a day. A minute is not a lot of downtime. 

I just encountered Hanif Abdurraqib's description of an annual braided-vignette document on a random topic of interest, which can grow to hold a book's worth of words that will never be public. I love that idea, and I'm curious about what the songwriting equivalent would look like. Perhaps a rhyme/stanza game within the St. Jerome's document? The band's goofing around with parody songs and Unbelievable Truth mashups might serve a similar function. Certainly digging in to etymology does.