How ’bout me, being friends with Townes Van Zandt. I’m less surprised that he interacts from beyond the grave than that he would choose to do it through myspace. I mean, hell, if he can manipulate technology from wherever he is, why not do something about Clearchannel?

Well, however he managed to pull it off, I’m grateful that the late great TVZ accepted my request to become my pal over here on MS. Like a lot of musicians and songwriters, I’ve been hugely influenced by his songs. Awhile back I wrote about my experience of listening to a particular album of his. That essay is over on my real blog, right here, if you’re interested.

I like to think about that T.S. Eliot bit about a hundred visions and revisions in terms of the process of writing and the balance between flashes of insight and the subsequent work of turning those flashes into something finished. I used to come down pretty firmly on the "Visions" side of the equation. I thought writing -- especially writing songs -- was 99% inspiration and only 1% perspiration (as the cliché has it). I'd get ideas and furiously write them as they came to me, reaching for the rhymes a bit, but mostly taking the ideas down in a steady stream. The real challenge from there was to make the music work with the text. Thus, the songs that worked the best for me were ones in which music and lyric came at the same time and inspiration at least did me the favor of following a consistent rhythm and rhyme scheme.

Over time I've come to appreciate how much craft and technique lies behind the art. Over a decade ago I found myself hanging around with some really good poets. I had the opportunity to observe them writing and revising and to participate in conversations about what made a passage or a line or a word better and what made things worse. I learned how to take (some) criticism without getting pissed off, what hard work revision is, and how to try to make things more concrete, more vivid. On the other hand, I also developed a tendency toward overly-philosophical themes and highfalutin language that I wouldn't shake for some time. Maybe still haven't.

At any rate, now I don't try to put too much pressure on inspiration to carry a song through to completion. I often have an idea for a song, maybe a partial chorus or a couple of lines, but I don't have much time to spend on it. Some years back, I would have been afraid not to finish something all the way through before moving on. Now I write what I can as quickly as I can, and then put it away. I look back over my fragments periodically to keep them percolating, but other than that I don't worry too much about it. I've learned to trust this "vision" stage to develop on its own and to not feel anxious about not finishing songs.

I know that when I do have time to work on something, if there was anything to it in the first place, I'll be able to work it up. On the other hand, if I come back to something a few times and I'm not feeling the love, it's probably best to let it go. And that's really another important piece of the whole process, I think: learning to let go of things that aren't working. Man, how I used to torture mediocre ideas into bad songs all because I hated to let go of some piece of inspiration. And it's still hard for me sometimes to just drop a song that's not working from the set list when I've gone to so much trouble to write and arrange it. Well, one step at a time, I guess.

Dear friends:

I want to give you a quick update on our music news in advance of some exciting events we have coming up.

First, the shows (on which more as each approaches):

February 23rd (a Saturday night) at Java Monkey. Shelle and I will start about 8:00 and play for a couple of hours. Hot coffee, cold beer, good food, free admission!

March 8th (Saturday) at Red Light Cafe. We're slated for the early slot, but shows always start late there. That's by design: they want you to get a drink or two and get settled. $7 at the door.

April 25th (Friday) at Eddie's Attic. This is a fund raising event for suicide prevention, and it will feature a number of acts along with a silent auction. Tickets will go on sale on March 1st and will cost $20 each with tables available for $100. Like I said, it's a fund raiser.

Second, recording: Shelle and I are headed to the studio this weekend to finish up the EP I started over a year ago (nothing like dragging it out!) and to record some songwriter's demos. Please send us good vibes for a good session, and I'll post some new recordings to the Web as things become available. And of course we'll let you know when the EP is ready for your CD player.

And speaking of the Web, you may or may not know that I have a "blog" at http://blog.mediumloud.com where I write about music and songwriting and recording and what have you. You can browse there periodically or subscribe using a news reader or "Live Bookmark" or similar. If you're interested, I mean.

OK, that's it! Thanks for reading, and as always, thanks for your support.

Peace,
Patrick

[reposted from my real blog, Departure]

Andy Whitman is just about my favorite music critic. Among other things, he writes for Paste magazine, and I always look for his reviews first. He recently wrote a blog post for Paste extolling a record by Jacob Goldman called Revenge Songs. I haven't heard the record (it's not out yet), but I was taken by Whitman's description of it, especially a song called "Zero Integrity": I never claimed to be the better man / I've got no integrity to cling to.

Thing is, most songwriters can't resist a little touch of pro-singer spin. Neil Young's "guitar fighting the TV" or Paul Simon's assurance that he, too, was "concerned with the child she carried." It takes something for a character to reveal his own shit-heeledness without flinching. To say flat out, "I've got no integrity to cling to."

I think there's something worth exploiting in that difficulty, the tendency characters have (oh, hell, that we all have) to take that little turn away from the harsh light of self-examination and put in a little plug for themselves. Though I'm not saying I'm any good at this as a songwriter myself, at turning that light on myself. For one thing, as I've discussed in this space before, I'm no great pour-your-soul-out confessional songwriter. For another, I'm a little bit sheltered in the heart break department, and I ain't fixing to clean out the savings account, grab a bottle of JD, and take the minivan to Vegas just so I can get my song on!

I've been going at this from another angle, playing with characters who don't seem to realize what wretches they are. Who keep telling themselves or their lovers or whoever will listen, "Anyone of you'd have done the same thing," or "I'm not the man you think I've been; / Just let me hold you close tonight." Is it making for good songs? Well, time will tell I guess, but I like them a lot. Come out to a show sometime soon and see if you like them too.

I've been posting on Departure recently about songwriting and suchlike. So, you know, you could go read. If you want.

Come and dig it!  Java Monkey.  Can't speak for the monkey, but the java is good.  And the beer and wine are good.  And the vibe is good.  The address is on Ponce, but the door is on Church street.  8 - 10. 

Over the weekend, I reworked a song I wrote in November, a song that I was thinking of dropping. Of course, it's quite common for me to revise a song rather than toss it, but this was kind of a special case.  This was a song I wrote because I was really annoyed with someone.  I was going to abandon it because it was so snarky, but I really like the refrain, so I rewrote the opening verses to take the meanness out of 'em.

Here's what happened.  I have this friend whom I don't see very often.  Haven't seen him in years, as a matter of fact.  A long time ago, I used to spend a lot of time with him, and he used to give me a lot of advice about lyrics.  He's a very good poet, so his advice, though not always welcome or easy to take, was on the whole helpful to my songwriting.  So in November, I went to see him and his wife after several years.  I guess he'd been reading books on commercial songwriting or something, because this time he was full of advice about writing memorable songs.  About syllable count, and hooks, and plain language and so forth.  He told me a good song was "like a three minute movie."

I agreed that this all made good sense and said I'd keep all these things in mind whenever I was writing that kind of song.  I sang a few of my newer songs for him, and we talked about some revisions I could make to smooth out some lines here and there, and I made some changes and thanked him for the input.  But the thing was, he wasn't satisfied to have convinced me that his advice was good for some of my songs.  He wanted to convince me that it was the only valid approach to songwriting, that I should never write another song without following this method, and that I should go back and re-write or throw away every song I've written that isn't a "three minute movie."

I really didn't want to get into an argument with him, but I did make a couple of half-assed attempts to convince him by means of example that, while he was describing a certain type of good songwriting, it was certainly not the only type of good songwriting: 

"Boots of Spanish Leather is a great song, and there's no hook, and you don't know where the title comes from until the last line of the song."

"Oh, Dylan always did his own thing; he doesn't count.  And for that matter, the 60s don't count because that was just a weird, experimental time, a time when people were open to all kinds of odd-ball things."

"Townes Van Zandt is one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century.  Plenty of hook-free songs:  Pueblo Waltz, Tecumseh Valley  . . ."

"I don't know much about him, but doesn't he come under that same sort of 60s thing?  I guess I'd have to know more of his songs."


I came to realize I could throw out example after example and it wouldn't matter because he'djust keep coming up with exceptions that "proved the rule."  The broadest being the "I've never heard of it" exception, since he dismisses out of hand gigantic swaths of popular music from the past 30 years that I love, such as R.E.M., Radiohead, Billy Bragg, Nirvana, Massive Attack, Jane's Addiction; the list may literally be endless.

But I realized there was another principle at work. It seemed to me that it should have been enough that I'm a reasonable, articulate, thinking person in full possession of my artistic and critical faculties.  I don't have any claim to great expertise in songwriting, but I reckon I've been standing in front of audiences performing my own material long enough to have at least earned the right to know how I want to approach writing my own damn songs.   If I can gracefully take your criticism for one kind of song, but then say I'm approaching other songs in a different way for intentional, aesthetic reasons, well, damn it, you ought to be able to respect it.  Even if you don't get it.

Of course, instead of telling my friend all of this in so many words, I tried to change the subject.  But he wouldn't let it drop.  So I left.  Then I needed to go back to his house a couple weeks later for some business with his wife and he started in again. Again I tried to change the subject, again I ended up just leaving.  But this time when I got home I wrote a snarky song called "Three Minute Movie" which we performed a couple weeks later at a house show.  Which brings me full circle.  Just this weekend, I took the mean stuff out that was specific to my "friend" (he's in quotes now, I see) and made it about generic advice to a Nashville songwriter wannabe. I reckon I'm gonna keep playing it, at least until I get tired of it.

Well, that's a load off my chest.  Now I can get some sleep.

I installed a plug-in for Firefox that's a blog editor that sits in the browser and let's me write blog posts in a nice little GUI editor and then post them to blogs.  It's got an extension that lets me publish to myspace too, and that is what I'm testing now.  It sure is nicer than the MySpace editor. And faster.

So now I'll hit "Publish" and see if it works.

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