I’m a cheat. When I pick my topics, I tend to avoid well-trodden ground like the plague (well, truth be told, the plague really isn’t a particularly common topic, but you know what I mean). For example, here’s the thing about “The Land of Misfit Toys”: I’m pretty sure that no one else has ever written a song about Gumby and Pokey as street thugs. In some sense, once you’ve got a central conceit like that, you’re halfway there. Now, writing about stuff that everybody else writes about, well, there’s the challenge.
Consider, for instance, the death of a parent. I don’t choose this as a random example – as some of you know, the reason for my recent absence is that my mother succumbed to abdominal cancer last month. Now, everybody’s got parents, and most people outlive their parents, and some of those people have been artists. So it’s safe to say that as an artistic topic, this is pretty familiar territory.
Tackling a familiar subject is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it maximizes your chances of connecting with the audience, because, well, it’s a familiar subject; on the other hand, lots of other people have had the same idea. The central challenge is always to find a compelling nugget of truth; the bigger challenge, here, is for it to be a fresh, compelling nugget.
When my mom first got sick, I wrote a song called “I Hope You’re OK”. I’ve never performed it, and I probably never will, but not because of the emotional weight behind it; it’s frankly not a very good or original take on the topic. In many ways, I wish I could write about my mom – she was a talented artist who never really got the chance to shine, and one of the big reasons I do what I do is because I don’t want to have to live with the “could’ve been”s.
It’s actually far more likely that I’ll write about my dad. I don’t envy his circumstances right now; he’s a tough old bird, and he’s in great health, but it must take an immense amount of fortitude just to get up in the morning when you’re 81 and you just lost your wife of 47 years. I think the story of the survivor is much more interesting, and much less commonly explored.
See, there I go, cheating again.