“Know Better”
(song written on September 6, but published to Patreon on September 17)
Agh, let’s try this again…
I mentioned in my last post that I was really excited about my last Song Game submission, and that I wrote a long nice post about it and lost it all.
The prompt that week was “what’s the what?” - I ended up using “what was what”... which is sort of like an answer to the “what’s the what?” question… so it kind of counts? (I know, not really.)
Earlier in the week I had a little melody in my head for the prompt that I thought would be cool to make all moorhaunter-y, so when I sat down to write it I opened up Ableton and spent a good hour or two crafting a funky beat-bed, but I just couldn’t get into it, it didn’t feel right. I closed up shop and decided to hit it old-school (for me), and set up songwriting camp on my bed.
I have a little room in my home where I like to write but I’m doing a spring(/fall?) cleaning and it’s too… shall we say… “in progress” for me to be comfortable in there at the moment… Actually, our bedroom isn’t so comfy for hanging out unless one is planning on being horizontal, but I was drawn to the late morning light coming through the window. It felt nice.
Writing tools were accumulated to the foot of the bed: guitar, capo, pen, notebook, and phone (admittedly I have to use a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary these days to break out of blocks as I go, and I need to record little melodies so I don’t forget them when I move on to a new section) all gathered together like old times. As I was prepping for the sesh I thought about how I used to always write on my bed, since basically until a few years ago the only solitary space I had was where I slept (and sometimes not even there). It was where I would go when I felt hollow or hopeless, trying to work things out with myself.
It reminded me again of that conversation Gavin and I had a few weeks ago about how some songwriters (ourselves included) must be conditioned to writing in times of heartbreak and loss, and how it’s a lot harder to come up with something to talk about when you’re feeling great. It’s true- it’s more difficult for me to come up with stories now to draw from, even though they’re there- like flipping through LPs in a record shop… though there’s always one to throw on. But it’s more than that- I don’t know that I get as much joy out of writing or listening as I once did. There’s definitely been some conscious work over the last year or so to try to heal myself from that, that disconnect from the thing I loved most - I know a lot of it is probably from what my friends and I call “The Big D” (depression), but a lot of it too has been my journey trying to monetize what I love most so that I could spend more time doing it.
Any time a big life decision has had to be made, music always won out, even when it didn’t make enough sense to warrant said choice. The estrangement from my family, dropping out of college to move to LA and record “Orange Days” (though, again, I think The Big D had a lot to do with those, too), leaving relationships that would’ve produced children, moving to Austin, taking and leaving one crappy job after another to grant me the flexibility to leave for tour, or play SXSW, or take 6 months off to be on reality TV… the list goes on. Of course this is a game of perspective and I have enjoyed my successes as they’ve come, but I’m turning 30 and don’t feel like I’m where I want to be. I still haven’t enjoyed the big “HA! It was worth it!” moment that I keep expecting will happen someday.
I thought all this through before I picked up my guitar - I really wanted to spend some time crafting something meaningful, if I could put all these thoughts down concisely like my songwriting idols: Bob Dylan, Conor Oberst, Elliott Smith. Using the same fingerpicking pattern Jordan Moser taught me 10 years ago, I plucked out a G chord- it felt really good.
This song hearkens back in style to my earlier songs, the ones Jordan is always urging me to make more of. I thought it would be a good musical context for the lyrics.
I need to work more on getting back to my roots. I’ve been meditating a lot on it lately, more in a forgiving way this year than in 2015 where I was really lost and devastated and angry about how I was feeling toward music in general because of the industry side of it. 2016 has been a big year of spiritual shifts for me, and in a sense I’m glad I don’t have to “rid myself” of things the way I used to.
“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
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