The Eye of the Beholder

March 30th, 2011

A while back, my pal Jon Waterman had a gig on his birthday, to which his significant other secretly invited a bunch of us, to share his birthday, and perhaps a song, perhaps one of his. I ultimately couldn’t go, but when I was planning on going, I tried working on a couple of Jon’s songs, and nothing was really working, and it hit me: why don’t I write a song for him? How often might this have happened in his life? (More than zero times, it turns out – after all, his significant other is also a songwriter. But this is me, not thinking.) Seems like a good birthday present, right?

So I did this. I called it “The Man in Black” (if you’ve seen Jon perform, you know why). It took me longer than I’d planned – the third verse sort of taunted me for a couple months – but ultimately, I finished the song, and on the very last day of 2010, I managed to record it and send it to him.

Now, Jon – he’s a good friend, but I can’t claim to know him exceptionally well. But I did take what I know of him and distill it into the song, and my view of the song was that it was somewhat poetic, but pretty specific to him.

Well, he wrote back, and this is what he said:

“Your song – to my understanding – creates a picturesque and romanticized alter-ego – for all of us really. An idealized and I think much needed version of ‘us.’ A sort of Johnny Appleseed of music roaming the land planting carefully crafted songs in a vast wasteland of Wii-fixated zombies. Of course, not all of us actually wear black. In my case, it’s simply because I don’t look so good in pastels.”

My first intuition was that Jon was deflecting the personal interpretation of the song because he was embarrassed, or perhaps because he disagreed with it. But after thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized that not only was he most likely completely serious, he was also right – or, at least, as right as I was.

It’s a cliche to say that art is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s true. My wife and I have a friend, Steve Black, who’s a marvelously talented photographer and assembler of found art, and we have hanging on our wall at home a large driftwood-and-trash sculpture of his that we both fell in love with the instant we saw it. And we have another friend, Hilary Scott, who’s made a significant name for himself doing these wacky Dr.-Seuss-meets-Edward-Gorey sculptures, who’s done a couple of commissions for us, including a set of insane kitchen cabinets. And Hilary was at the house one time, and Steve’s sculpture was leaning against the wall, waiting to be hung, and I pointed it out to Hilary – who’s mastered more sculptural genres than I can list – and it was clear that, although he was trying to be polite, he thought that Steve’s sculpture was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen in his life.

And so it goes. It is not that the magic is either there or not there. It is there for me; it is not there for Hilary. And so what Jon sees in my song, it’s there. What I see in my song, it’s there. What you’d see in my song? It’s there, because you see it. That’s the beautiful thing about art – once it’s released into the world, the creator no longer really owns it. It’s yours, it’s mine, it’s anyone’s – as long as we take the time to pay attention.

I think, as much as anything, this is why I do what I do. Sure, I love the applause; but what amazes and humbles me is that you listen, and think, and draw your own conclusions, that what I write – my songs and my newsletters – touches you and speaks to events in your own lives. At the risk of sounding maudlin (yes, well, that ship has sailed, at least for this column), it connects me to the world in a way that little else could. So thanks, again, for listening.

Comments are closed.