One of the many things I claim to have some modicum of skill at is carpentry. I’ve built a good deal of the furniture in the home I share with my adoring wife, She Who Must Be Taunted: our bed, our stereo cabinet and speaker stands, our medicine cabinet, my desk. Not a single curve can be found, because I don’t own a lathe and the damn things scare the hell out of me, but I’m still pretty proud of my work, and it’s one of the activities in which I can achieve that “flow” state where the world stops around you and there’s nothing but you and what you’re doing.
Making things is cool. I love that you can start with an idea and end up with a cabinet, where there was previously, well, not a cabinet. But songwriting, well – songwriting is even more amazing. Because, when I build a cabinet, I start with one pile of lumber and end with a different configuration of the same pile of lumber – but before I write a song, there is literally nothing, and then, suddenly (or gradually and with great pain, in most cases), there’s a song.
I’m on a writing kick, nowadays. I haven’t written regularly since I finished my last album (“Bad Apple”, maybe you’ve heard of it, or, if you’re smart, downloaded it already), and if you don’t practice, you start to suck, so. A song a month, that’s what I’m gonna do, and I’ve written a song in each of the last three months, and who knows, maybe it’ll stick this time.
For January, I went back to my songwriting notebook. There was a title: “The Last War”. And a blank page. I had no idea what a song called “The Last War” would be about, but I thought it would be fun to find out, and, after several days of aimless scribbling, and a few well-intentioned suggestions that went nowhere, I discovered (or maybe decided, but probably not) that the singer of the song was another of my beloved flawed narrators: a serial divorcee who has no clue that he’s doing anything wrong.
I’ll say what I always say
I’ll do what I’ve always done
It’s a game plan tried and true
Don’t tell me that it doesn’t work for you
I’ll scoff when I walk away
Remember that time will tell
Why should I fight the next war
When the last one went so well
It’s a banger, an idiot’s anthem. Where did it come from? Nowhere. The idea wasn’t even the idea I was pursuing, for heaven’s sake. It was nothing, and now it’s something.
It’s magic, really. I “understand” my songwriting process to the extent that I can reliably poke and prod it in a direction which will ultimately result in a song, but that’s pretty much it. I have no real idea how it happens; I just know that it will if I let it. There was nothing, and then there’s something. And that’s the story of art.