I had a couple of conversations this week that were meaningful to me, and I thought I’d take some time to share them – you’ll see why. The first was with a friend whose family has had some significant health issues over the last year or so. I wrote him to check to see how he was doing, and the health problems are abating, and he speculated about whether he was going to start playing again. “I did get my guitar overhauled recently with that in mind”, he said. The second was with a musical acquaintance who reappeared after a relatively long absence, who commented to me that she had been derailed by “life changes”, which were now concluded, and so it was time to stop procrastinating and start playing again.
That’s us: cranky, slightly decrepit, middle-aged Energizer Bunnies.
We just keep coming back, don’t we? Illness, children, parents, stressful jobs, doesn’t matter. The guitar is always sulking there in the corner, feeling abandoned, staring at us accusingly as we go about the rest of our business. There’s always that twitch in the fingers, those random words from billboards jumping out to form chorus hooks like refrigerator magnet poetry (and yes, “Fridge Magnet Poetry” is a great title for a song, and no, you can’t use it). It’s almost as if instead of our writing the songs, the songs are writing us.
Being a musician is a mysterious, wondrous thing. I can’t explain how I play the guitar, or write a melody – I have no idea where it comes from. It just does. It’s as much a part of me as my beard – shave it off and it grows back. The activity can be frustrating, or time-consuming, or lonely, but never as frustrating as not doing it at all. I remember when I was younger, a little lazier, less patient, and I’d stop performing for months at a time, because I hated the booking, the late nights, the rushed evenings after work, the hours away from the Red Sox games on television. And I was not happy.
I know that some of it is vanity. But I’d like to think that the best part of it is the songs that are writing me: they keep knocking, and I write them down, and it’s not enough to play them for the furniture in my living room. Inspiration demands creation, creation demands performance. And so you’ll keep seeing me, as long as the songs keep clawing their way out. Because like my friends I spoke to this week, I frankly don’t have much of a choice in the matter.
Y’know, “The Songs that Write Me” is a pretty good title for a song…