“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”
- Ernest Hemingway (Preface to The First Forty-Nine)
It’s been about twelve months since I’ve completed a song — that is unless you count assignments written on deadline for specific purposes, songs that I know even as I finish them that I will not call them mine — and this is a strange thing. Prolificacy has never been my strong point, but I’d average at least three or four a year, back when I spent most nights in the same bed as I’d slept the night before. The problem isn’t a lack of material, certainly. There have been cinematic moments in abundance these past few years, first-person and third-person both, art films and character dramas and sweet smart Hollywood comedies. The camera in my head has been rolling steadily, recording it all for the archives. But no songs. I don’t have an easy explanation for it, and Hemingway’s seems to work as well as any. There is a feeling that even as the world unfolds its many layers for me, I’m forgetting how to translate it. I can remember it again, but it’ll take some work.
The bar is higher now, anyway. I intend to do something different from Waking Hour and Warm Strangers songs; there’s a trajectory I’m trying to draw and it’s not a straight horizontal line. When I sit down at the piano now, anything that comes too easily, from the worn grooves of comfortable patterns, is out immediately. I’ve traveled far beyond the fifty-mile radius I called home for the first twenty-two years of my life, and it feels good to be out here now, moving constantly among the unfamiliar. Any music I write has to reflect that. So it’s harder going, hunting down the melodies and words that resonate with this new state of being. Adventurous but honest. A little more grown up but still the same person. Elusive things, the songs-to-be that contain this tension. I remind myself that anything worth learning is tricky at first.
We’ve got the day off in Indianapolis, and I’m fighting with USB cardreader software so I can pick out some photos for y’all. The Modern Troubadours tour thus far has been swell, and posting about that will make a nice contrast to all this artiste fretting.