Wood and silver, ‘n the light still shines
I’ve still got mine but ya can’t read the name
Ain’t worth nothing but it works just fine
After all this time ya’d think I woulda thrown it away
Those were powerful times; driving around, listening to the CDs of a band I was about to join, getting totally wrapped up in the songs. Not even the songs themselves, but the entity right behind the songs that you only begin to hear once you really love them – once the magic happens for you. The songs become sponges, soaking up whatever’s going on in your life at the moment. Listening to those Shazam songs are in themselves happy memories, but the truth is that I was in my car driving aimlessly because I was in trouble with my ex-wife for something and was afraid to go home. The songs provided a much-needed vacation.
They were most certainly written with the author (one Hans Rotenberry) knowing that his creations would go out into the world and capture peoples’ memories, moving them to feel something other than the tedium of everyday life. If you tried to get all sappy with him about them though, he’d probably get uncomfortable. Last night on my way to practice with local southern rockers Les Honky More Tonkies, listening to Wilco, I wondered what Jeff’s friends think when they listen to Wilco CDs. Do they think “I can’t believe Jeff, of all people, made this insanely amazing music – he seems so normal”? Do their minds momentarily churn with excitement at the thought of asking him what he was thinking when writing a song before realizing that they should drop it, lest they make him terribly uncomfortable?
Songs capture moments for their creators as well, and I think that’s the root of why talking about them with the songwriters themselves can make them uncomfortable. At some point they loved the song enough to bring it into being, and loved it enough to record it or play it for an audience. After that, who knows? I think it’s the excitement of that moment of creation that we want to know about, that moment when some regular person created something extraordinary that can move us in the way that only music can. It’s buying into the myth, I suppose.
When you put your favorite album in, you own the myth of that record. You smell it, taste it and feel it in your whole body. Each song has a meaning and each note has a memory. Unfortunately, when you play it for someone who’s not in the mood, all they hear are songs with a beginning, a middle and thankfully an end. There isn’t some x-factor that consistently moves people to accept a piece of music as valid rather than an amateurish attempt to seem valid.
My new album’s release is three weeks away, and that means that a lot of music reviewers, radio station music programmers and music lovers with expectations will be looking at the artwork and hearing my songs, attempting to decide what makes them work and not work.
I am largely uninterested in this for some reason.
Perhaps it’s some defense mechanism, childishly rejecting the glowing reviews with the scathing. I’d prefer to think of it as simply feeling like I should enjoy having captured a stage of my life as well as I could at the time. Some will inevitably feel that the 17-track album “could lose a few songs” but to do so would be to lose a piece of the story – the overall effect is more important to me than having a short record. Some will say that it’s not enough this or enough that, but I don’t particularly remember things being 100% rosy or 100% terrible. The only reason I enjoyed the sweet as much as I did was because I could still taste bitter stricknine in the back of my throat. Does that mean that I’m buying my own myth? I don’t think so – I know where the songs came from and that I am proud that I brought them into being. What people do with them after that shouldn’t affect me one way or the other. It’s dangerous to buy your own myth anyway. Best to view yourself as a work in progress, and I certainly do that. This afternoon, I’ll hold the first copy in my hands and while I’m excited about it, it doesn’t mean the same thing it used to. I feel fulfilled that something has come to fruition and I’ll have some closure on that chapter of my life. The seventeen-year-old version of myself would have been quite sure that it was the most important thing ever. Cute kid – not too bright, though.
The follow-up EP is coming along; tracks are steadily being recorded and artwork is in progress. This will be a lot tighter than the album’s performances, and will show yet another side after deceptively starting off a bit poppy.
Paul is about to be a year old. That means so many things that I don’t know where to start – he has taken his first step but hasn’t followed it with a second (though it’s not far away) and he’s actually communicating with us now. It’s very strange. A minute ago he was a bean in an ultrasound and now he’s such a huge part of who I am, with a personality larger than life. Everywhere he goes, peoples’ faces light up. I hope he can always do that.
I didn’t have insurance for so long that last month I started taking care of this huge health-laundry list of things I’d been wanting taken care of. Yesterday the problem was finding the source of why my kidneys have been hurting. They did an ultrasound on me and I guess I’ll find out what ailment I have (kidney stones?) this afternoon. Today it’s finding out what damage was done in a hit-and-run rear-ending that happened to me in 2001. Neck pain has returned and now that I have the means to see a doctor about it, I will. Next month, shortly after the album release I will finally be liberated from the tyranny of my perpetually-infected tonsils. I hear that a tonsillectomy hurts worse than anything many people have experienced, including childbirth. I will go on the record now as saying that I do not care what I have to go through to get them out and start living a normal life. Every morning I wake up with my voice a little different than it was the day before (slightly higher or lower) and I know that it hurts my singing in two ways. First, obviously if your instrument is retuned every day, you’re only going to get so good at it. Second, the scar tissue that builds up and has to be scraped loose (how’s that for a mental image?!) every six weeks or so limits the upper end of my vocal range considerably the more of it there is. I’m always sick because of my inflamed tonsils’ open invitation to germs, and allergies affect me to a much greater degree thanks to the tonsils. I’m sick of them and I want them out. On June 14th I will return home with my tonsils in a jar and no matter how bad it hurts, I will have done the right thing. Apparently it only means 2-3 weeks of downtime. I do that by accident as it is.
So wish me luck with the health stuff and that the CDs arrive sooner rather than later. I’m anxious to see them.
