I’ve been listening to my album-to-be, in all its almost-mixed glory, and it’s making me pretty damn happy. You’re gonna love it, I’m pretty sure; it’s the best written and best recorded album I’ve ever done. And now that I can see the light at the end of that particular tunnel, I’ve turned my attention back to the thing that I always think I’m supposed to be doing, namely, songwriting. And as I’m listening to that album-to-be, I’ve been asking myself: how much better does it get?
See, someday I’m going to write the best song I’ve ever written. Every one of us songwriters does that, eventually. But the thing is, you never know when it’s happened – it’s only apparent later. You’ll be sitting around, finishing a song, and think, “Hey, that’s a good one, but it isn’t as good as ‘Broomsticks in Berlin’.” And five years later, you’ll be sitting around, finishing another song, and think, “Wow, that’s pretty damn good, but it isn’t as good as ‘Broomsticks in Berlin’.” And then, eventually, you’ll be lying there in your computerized deathbed, with the ass-wiping robots hovering around you, and you’ll realize, “You know, none of them were as good as ‘Broomsticks in Berlin’. I should have stopped while I was ahead.” And then you’ll die. And your fellow, now-decrepit songwriters will gather at your wake, and one of them will play “Broomsticks in Berlin”, and someone else will say, “Yeah, that was his best tune. Shame about the last thirty years.” And everybody else will nod.
I’m joking, of course. (At least, I think I’m joking.) It’s not really a competition. (In your face, “Broomsticks in Berlin”.) But I do want, every time I write a song, to write a great one. And lately, well, that hasn’t been the case. I’ve been writing novelty tunes, or tunes at songwriters-in-the-round gunpoint, and I haven’t been writing a lot of them. And I’ve noticed that when I don’t write many songs, well, they’re not very good.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who understands about practicing. Very few of us are true geniuses, and the thing that distinguishes true genius from the rest of us is, basically, the baseline level of skill. Mozart could sneeze out masterpieces; me, not so much. Like the rest of the vast unwashed, I need to work at it. And I haven’t been.
So lately, my commitment is to write more songs. A lot more songs. And so I’m getting back in touch with my process, and, in fact, learning a lot more about it. For example, it seems that the first song is always another novelty song; in this case, it was a country tune about end-user license agreements (don’t ask; you’re likely never to hear it). But that’s the easy part. The next part is the bear.
What I’m learning is that the rest of my process is designed to generate neurosis and trauma. For instance, I’ve just finished another tune, and I’m not going to tell you about it, because it’s faaaaabulous and I’m going to play it at Roslindale next week, and beyond that I want it to be a surprise, but I’ve been staring at this tune for several weeks. I loved the idea, and I started scribbling, and I produced, for quite a while, material that is not quite suitable for birdcage lining (those birds, they’re quite the critics – and you really haven’t suffered until you’ve encountered a parrot crapping on your lyrics while repeating them incessantly at the same time). I’d pick up the lyric sheet every morning, and play the chords I’d chosen, and the song would limp unenthusiastically from one side of the room to the other, as if it was taunting me to give up on it. Which I did not do.
It turns out, apparently, that if the song doesn’t write itself in an afternoon, it takes its own sweet time showing up. But it does, eventually, show up, if I keep after it. Last weekend, I woke up and played a slightly different chord, and several hours later the song was completely done, in all its snarky, upbeat glory. Many of the birdcage lines turned out to be perfectly serviceable – brilliant in places – once they knew where to go. But it required patience to coax the little bugger out of its lair. Patience that I have to remember.
You’d think that I have little left to learn about my own process after all these years. But we can get awfully old before the insights hit. And I’m glad that I figured this bit out. Because I haven’t written “Broomsticks in Berlin” yet.