All posts for March, 2012

This second installment is also a story about the first 14 songs in 14 days project, but it’s about one of the songs that didn’t work. Well, it did work. The problem was that when I tried to actually make the song, I could no longer remember the idea.

One of the things I learned in this first 14 days project was that there really is no such thing as “Writer’s Block”. Songs are literally everywhere! If you want a new song, you can have one. OK. It’s not quite as simple as that sounds. The one you can have at any given moment might not be one you would be willing to perform (or even admit to having written) to anyone.  As Pat Pattison is fond of saying, “90% of what you write is NOT your best 10%.”  In other words, once you have it, you may hate it. So what?

I saw a TED Talk (If you don’t know about these, you are definitely in for a treat. Go to http://www.ted.com/talks for a treasure trove of great speeches and ideas. Go even if you do know about them. There’s always something new.) by Elizabeth Gilbert in which she talks about nurturing creativity.  Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love – an absolutely delicious illuminating book.  Check that out too, if you haven’t already.  Anyway, my favorite moment is when she describes Tom Waits who has just had a great song idea, looking up through his windshield as he’s driving down the freeway, in the rain I think, and he speaks to the universe thusly: “Can you not see that I’m driving right now????? Come back later!!!!!”

I believe that worked for him. I have no confidence that it would work for me, as all the evidence so far points the other way.

However, on the second Wednesday of our project, I had this wonderful idea for “today’s song”. Unfortunately, I was teaching someone’s piano lesson at the time, and couldn’t follow through. By the time the lesson was over, the song was gone.  I once heard Janis Ian say that she thought it was the height of arrogance to refuse a song entry when one came to you. I totally agree with her. If you refuse, it goes somewhere else. Which is what this one did, I guess.  Anyway, it was no longer mine.

So as I’m rounding the corner to my street, I realize the song is gone and I still need one for the project for this day. Oddly, although I’m sad, I’m not devastated. As I try to convince myself that the song will return if I listen hard enough, I’m reminded of a night when I was living in New York when I was listening to the radio and was astonished to hear a station that I knew was coming from Detroit. It was “Rockin’ Robin” Seymour from WKMH. When I asked the next day, I was told that radio waves sometimes hit the stratosphere and bounce back to earth at an angle. I took this at face value, since I’d actually heard it happen. Now that I’m writing it, I find myself wondering what they could hit in the stratosphere, but I’ll have to save that for later.

I became convinced that my song idea still existed in the universe and would someday return to me — and that’s what my song that day turned out to be about. I will never know if that first idea actually does come back, but I was pretty happy with the resulting lament.

So here’s the song. It’s a home recording, done on my little AKAI hard-disk recorder: Wednesday’s Song

Before I leave you, I wanted to make you aware of something wonderful. My friend Jean Synodinos, who is part of this project, put out an album last fall that included not only some of her 14 songs, but one from another member of the group, Katie Gosnell. The album just won the Texas Music Awards “Album of the Year”. It’s in permanent rotation in my car. You should check it out:  http://jeansynodinos.com

There’s really no explanation for people subjecting themselves this kind of insanity, but I’ll do my best to tell you how it began.

Pat Pattison is a Professor at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches Lyric Writing and Poetry. He comes to Austin, Texas twice a year to teach a workshop for local songwriters. I usually attend, and so I was present in April of 2010, when he mentioned that one of his Berklee students was challenging herself to write a song a day for 14 days. All around the room, heads rose up, and you could almost hear people thinking “I want to do that!”

So that evening, as all of the workshop attendees were drinking in the hotel bar (This may be a significant factor), we worked out the parameters of our challenge. We would write the song, record it, and have share it with the others in the group each day by midnight. Jean offered to set up a way for us to share our songs.  Katie offered to coordinate the group.  Then we all went home to try and figure out what in the world made us volunteer, and worry about whether or not we really wanted to put our songs where our mouths was.

All except Jean, who already had her first song.

I began with a song about the city where I spent my childhood. I decided to write about Detroit because I watched a movie called Grand Torino and realized about halfway through it that I was giving a great deal of attention to the scenery, trying to figure out where in Detroit it was taking place. Looking for familiar things, which, of course, are long gone.

From there I moved on to an little ditty about my daughter’s boyfriend, a song about my garden (written in my garden!), and a song about the song that got away.  Everything was going pretty smoothly, although I was still wondering why I had volunteered for this. Several of the other people had written songs about the project, which I considered cheating, but some were pretty funny. My favorite was Kit’s tune called “Just a Song”, about being self conscious. The best part of it was the bridge, which was “I don’t have a bridge. Do I really need a bridge?” over gorgeous chords.

At the end of the second week, I was to fly to New York to see my daughter. I got on the plane, set my spiral notebook on my lap, blank page at the ready. And stared at it. For a long time. That thing they refer to as “The Tyranny of the Blank Page” is very real, and very intimidating. “How’s this going to work?”, I thought to myself. Suddenly the woman in the seat next to me said to her friend next to her, “You know … flying is actually impossible.”  A little smile crept across my face, so I kept it turned away from her. “Thank you”, I said to the universe.  Thereafter, I wrote down most of the conversation in shorthand, so they wouldn’t know what I was doing if they happened to look over my shoulder. I felt profoundly grateful to the high school teacher who taught me shorthand at that moment. I do hope she was well rewarded, wherever she is …..

There were three days left of the project when I got on that plane, and so the last three songs were written in New York. They all ended up on my newest CD, which will be released this year. Here’s a rough mix of the one written that day on the plane.

Flying To New York City