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Since I just did another workshop with Pat Pattison, that professor from Berklee School of Music that started all these 14-days projects, I’m going to tell you about another one of the resulting songs……  (Side note to someone who may be reading this: Hi Clare!)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I spent the last three days of the first 14-Day Challenge in New York City.  Although I had liked some of the songs I’d written in the previous 11 days, I didn’t feel like they went very deep. And I knew they were going to need serious re-writing in order to make them into anything I thought worthwhile. I had to remind myself that the goal here wasn’t a finished, polished song, but 14 new ideas. But that was a difficult concept for me, as I’ve always liked to chew on the idea for awhile before presenting it to anyone. The most I could do in the case of these songs was hope that I got them early enough in the day so I could tweak them a bit before they had to be recorded and posted. Not comfortable at all!

When I went to New York, though, I had no way to record the songs, so I couldn’t post anything but lyrics. (I’ve since solved this issue by buying a USB mic and installing Garage Band on my laptop, but I didn’t have those things at the time.) I was very happy about the situation, because that gave me extra time to think about what the songs said. Consequently, those last three songs are my favorites of the 14, and all three of them will be on my new CD.

Speaking of my new CD, I’m about to do a Kickstarter campaign (or something like it) to raise the money for the mixing, mastering and manufacture of it. There will be more details about this in a later post.

So anyway, there I am in New York City, where I myself used to live. Only when I lived there, New York was a very different place. Danger lurked around every corner. This was the land of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death as people watched from their apartments, being too afraid and too inured to violence to interfere. Central Park was off-limits after sundown. Muggers thrived. Being very young, I was blissfully unaware of the danger.  I would regularly walk out after midnight to get something at the store or whatnot, and never think twice about it. Even though I was almost mugged once, and followed more than once, none of those episodes made a dent in my consciousness.  I was part of the “flower child” era, and a true believer. Needless to say, I survived both the danger and my hippie dreams, and here I am today. But the reason I mention it is that I lived on the West Side within a couple blocks of “Needle park” (a “shooting gallery” at 72d and Broadway), and I worked in Greenwich Village, which was, well, the Village.

The Village is divided by Broadway in the West Village and the East Village. The remnants of the Beat generation and the Great Folk Scare lived mostly in the West Village, with other random intellectuals. NYU is in the West Village. The park that is featured in “Searching for Bobby Fisher” where people play chess is in the West Village.

The East Village, and especially St. Marks Place in the East Village, was home to more than a few remnants of the Weather Underground, and various psychotropic and other drug devotees. I once had occasion to walk down St. Marks Place and even in mid-afternoon, it was almost deserted except for folks I did not want to know any better than this. Ever. My impression of the people I saw was that, if they could pull their act together, they would kill me, and probably eat me too. More likely they were perfectly harmless, but that was mainly, I thought, because they would never be pulling their act together again.

Well! My daughter’s apartment was in the heart of the East Village, about two blocks from where the Weather Underground blew up a house while trying to make bombs in my day. (Which served, by the way, to convince me that my role in the anti-war movement was to march and carry signs.) There are little mom/pop stores, upscale boutiques, laundromats, all the things you find in a settled neighborhood.  I was walking down St. Marks Place and thinking about my last sojourn to this neighborhood, and all those burned-out hippies I saw, and how they and their families, particularly their mothers, might have felt about their decline. The result was the song attached to this posting.

HIgh Hopes For You

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

I confess, I have often fallen prey to the “It can’t happen here” syndrome. When I hear about someone else’s health problems, my response is quite frequently ” Oh, well, I don’t eat (Fill in the blank: meat, milk, MacDonalds, etc.)”, or “I don’t have those genetic factors”, or “I don’t do dangerous things (not physically dangerous ones, anyway)” or whatever…. so this doesn’t apply to me. Bad things happen to other folks, in a distant galaxy far far away. And I don’t believe I’m alone in this response. (You know who you are!)  I sport this mindset, even though I have just recently received a memorable (You would think!) lesson in how I, too, can be knocked around by a good, stiff wind. I, too, can be the victim of a bad surprise.

In fact, I was doing it again on our latest foray into the rest of the world besides where we live. I was running one early Big Island, Hawaii morning. I love running there. It’s summertime and the actual temperature is pretty warm, but the Trade Winds blow non-stop, making the temperature feel a lot cooler on your skin. A 30-minute run thus feels like it takes about 30 seconds, because the weather feels so pleasant, because there’s so much beauty to look at, so many new and interesting birds and flowers to notice. It’s just nice.   So I’m running this circular path I have found, and thinking self-congratulatorily about how much healthier I was than the average American human of my circumstances.

And comparing myself to my husband, since he’s the closest. My poor husband, loves to travel, but usually gets so stressed that one day of the trip will be spent in bed. I don’t know why this is; I just know it happens on most of the trips we take.  And  I have often thought, I’m distressed to admit, that if he’d just eat the foods I eat, and not eat the ones I don’t, if he’d exercise the same exercises I do, if he’d just do what I tell him to, he’d be so much healthier.

When suddenly…………I remembered our impromptu trip to the emergency room this past February, the second one in the past 2 years. Not to mention that back injury that slowed me down significantly for about 3 months about three years ago. And I remembered turning to him on this occasion and saying, “If I’m so much healthier than you are, how come I’m the one that keeps ending up in the emergency room?”

Well…..another arrogant human bites the dust, I guess. Anything can happen anytime. Someone to whom I expressed my outrage  said, “You have to remember that it’s ‘risk abatement’ not ‘risk avoidance’. I think she’s right. I like to think I’ll remember it in the future, but I probably won’t.

All the local and statewide libraries are looking for artists of all kinds to lure unsuspecting children into the libraries during the summer about now. I say unsuspecting because the kids think they’re there to have fun, whereas the librarians hope to inspire a lifelong love of reading. I can sympathize on both sides, as I had a strong aversion to being lured to anything by any adult. But I have loved reading my whole life — first, because it was a great way to escape from my whole life, and second, because going to the library meant I was not at home doing chores or schoolwork, or listening to the ever-growing list of my shortcomings.

My friend, Sue, and I both took our shows to San Antonio to entertain the librarians and perhaps book a show or two for the summer. There were seven or eight acts there, but some had already made their presentations before we arrived. The first act we saw was a collection of animals: a porcupine, an otter (I think), a snake, and a few others. When they were done leading their animals around for everyone to get a closer look, they were followed by a puppeteer, Bob. His opening statement was: “Never follow an animal act,” but he was still very entertaining. He had a ventriloquist’s dummy he claimed to have owned for 40 years, and he held a pretty funny conversation with it. Then he sang a song with it (It sounds impossible, I know, but he did.) As they sang, the dummy began to lose segments of himself, until all that was left was his mouth. He kept exhorting the puppeteer to “Keep singing!”, which Bob did. I have no doubt that kids will find this hilarious. I found it a little disturbing.

I went up after Bob and his dismembered dummy, and I was followed by a very good, and very funny magician. Quite dynamic.

Sue went on next, and then there was another magician, also quite good. At the end of his set though, he began to discuss prices with the audience. This is normal, Sue tells me. But he offered his show at staggeringly low prices, and all the other presenters commented on it. Perhaps he had his finger on the pulse, and we’re all just slow to catch up. Or he just does his act for the love of it. Didn’t have a chance to ask.

He was last, so now it’s time for the librarians to talk turkey with the presenters. All of the librarians MOB (I’m accurately describing this scene) the animal act. Then they turn to the magicians. Bob complains that one librarian who usually books him told him that she had no money this year. Then she proceeded to book the animal act. Bob is incensed and not terribly discreet about it. (Though he helped me get my equipment back to my car, so I see him as a very kind and deserving fellow indeed!)

From my point of view, the librarians are doing an admirable job, considering their funding has been cut repeatedly for the last decade. I may just find myself donating a show or two to a needy community — my own, perhaps. Even so, it takes time and money to present a show, even for children at the library, so I’m hoping this devaluing of the arts doesn’t continue much longer.