Songwriting and Effable Relationships

*Edited for children

A good friend of mine, whom I trust and whose opinion I put a great deal of stock in, tells me that I write too many songs about f*cked up relationships. She tells me that there are many, many other things to write and sing about, and the fact that 99% of my writing deals with break-ups, broken hearts, and slamming the brakes on love, is not a good use (or at least an over-use) of lyrics and strings and melodies. (Consequently, for those of you keeping track of percentages at home, the other 1% breaks down like this: .5% for dumb-silly songs made up on the fly, .4% for songs that have no words, only whistling or la-la-la’s, and .1% for songs about happy relationships.)

She tells me this because, I think, she is sick of hearing the same song over and over and over, only dressed up with a slightly different strum pattern and chord progression. Also, I suspect, she knows what I know – as far as f*cked up relationships go, there is not much left to say. Fly as far away as the moon, or stand as close as on a doorstep – the message is the same: You don’t love me anymore and, baby, that pretty much sucks. She tells me this, also, because she is a good friend, an honest critic, and as part of her grasping for “Authenticity.”

In light of this authentic observation, then, I try to write a song that has nothing to do with a girl, a boy, or a relationship – although, this only in retrospect. I’m sitting at work, and during one of my eternal moments I jot down the lyric: “40 days later and I’m still the same jackass/ Desert life did nothing for me, over at last.” Of course this little couplet has all the makings of another sad-b*stard love song, but as I’m trying to think of a tune, my friend’s comment sounds in my head, and as I continue to jot down words the song makes a lyrical shift in meaning. Working from the obvious Jesus allusion, I begin to write, in a playfully sadistic manner, insidious reversals of Jesus’ words. I had no idea in mind, only not to write about a girl. I wrote things like, “I’ll turn whatever I want to bread/ or eat the stones instead. I’ll jump from the top of the Empire State/ and tempt my own fate. I’ll take all the power you’ll trade/ that worshiping you made.” And then I started to play on the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the rich, they own all the poor/ Blessed are the full, eating the hungry to the core. Let those who persecute me in my name/ burn forever in a hell of flames.” The chorus simply said, “We, Anti-Christ. We, Anti-Christ. At any price. We, Anti-Christ.”

So on and so forth. Completely unoriginal and uncreative lyrics, but somewhat disturbing to write down. It turned out to be a political-theological-critical rant against America, and the embodiment of religious fundamentalism here (although, I swear, it didn’t start out that way – I was only writing decidedly un-clever reversals of Jesus’ words – only afterwards did I realize I was being descriptive of the U.S., oddly enough). I set the lyrics to some, what I would consider, heavy-grudge chord strumming, and sang it with what started out as a Cobain-esque bellowing – but having recently seen and being influenced by a System of a Down music video, it became an angry screeching voicing of words. I wanted the song to be angry and loud, but acoustic as well – so that another friend of mine, THAT Dave, who knows more about music than Zombies know about walking slow and being dead, could appreciate some nice non-sappy, non-lesbian-vocaled, acoustic guitar. (Dave, do you read this? If not that whole last sentence has very little meaning…)

Anyway, I think I can safely report that the whole experiment was a failure. What the hell? Political songs? Anti-Christ? (Oh, I just realized – given the endemic and epidemic spread of individualism, I should have entitled the song “I, Anti-Christ.” D*mn.) This is not what music is for. This is not what music is for. I’m pretty sure, this is not what music is for. Let me try to explain.

I’ve been reading a collection of essays about music by Nick Hornby, author of the book High Fidelity, which was adapted into a movie, starring John Cusack, and is one of my favorites, if not the magnum opus itself. The essays read as if they were written by Cusack’s character in the movie, Rob Gordon, which is unassailably cool. (Anybody?) Anyway, in one of his essays, Hornby takes up the all-important question: What is the appropriate subject matter for a song? And he says that while songs about trees, and roads, and rivers, and whatnot can be good, the truly great ones are about romance and love. He makes an explicit observation about the nature of love and music that I have known implicitly for a long time – Love, with it’s rollercoaster feelings of ups and downs, highs and lows, is a perfect metaphor for music itself. There is a natural affinity between the two; they belong together; and this is why love songs are the songs that are most likely to endure in the hearts as well as on the radios of those who listen. Music is a pure form of self-expression, to the point that sometimes words only get in the way. And its a form that molds itself perfectly to expressing love and pain and loss. This is why singing about anything other than love is almost artificial.

Hornby writes, “Songs that are about complicated things—Canadian court orders, say, or the homosexual age of consent—draw attention to the inherent artificiality of the medium: Why is this guy singing? Why doesn’t he write a newspaper article, or talk to a phone-in show? And how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway?”

Human expressions each have a medium that are best suited for them. And I think music was created out of and for love, and especially when love fails us, or more likely, when we fail love. Music brings comfort. Our greatest songs are written about our greatest pain, because that is when we need our greatest comfort.

If I want to write about how we Americans pledge allegiance to the Anti-Christ, I’ll write a paper, or an essay (and I’m sure I’ll write plenty). But maybe I should save my songwriting for fluttered, frustrated, and especially, f*cked up relationships.

Having said all that, my all-time, desert island, favorite song is John Lennon’s Imagine.

Eternal Moments

I sit in the place I work staring out a window onto Ponce De Leon Avenue, or Street, or Road, or maybe even Lane, though probably not Lane. I sit and I stare at cars, vans, trucks, and bicycles drive by all day long. People cross the street (or road, or avenue, or lane, though probably not lane), and cars park in the parking lot. The sun shines, or it doesn’t. Rain doesn’t fall, or it does. Life moves forward outside the wall of windows that block me out of the outside world, but doesn’t block out my ability to see life move forward, and move at an everyday existence kind of pace.

When my shift is over, if its ever really over, I leave the box of windows that is the office I work at, a place that even uses windows for tables, so that I can see my feet, moving at the pace of everyday feet, through the table – when I leave this place, I enter into the outside world, and assume the everyday pace of those who live outside the box of windows that is my workplace. I assume the pace and speed of the people and plants and pieces of paper that blow around in the wind, which before I had only observed from my desk, but now come into community with by virtue of being outside, and moving at the same pace. The pace of the outside world is fast. Everyday pace is a quick pace. Not long after I join the everyday pace of the outside world I am right back in the box of windows, once again being blocked out, but not my vision, which I use to observe all those things that I observed the last time I sat here, at my desk and stared out the window.

It was during one of these moments of staring out the windows of my workplace, the ones in the wall, and not the ones we use for tables, that I came to understand that there are moments that are eternal. There are moments when, even though you know you lived before them and that presumably (unless you are going to die in one, in which case it becomes a completely different genre of moment) you will live after them, time ceases to move, or moves so slowly as to not be perceptively moving at all, which is the same as not moving. These moments are eternal moments. They are moments that last forever. They feel like forever. Forever becomes a blanket of time that descends from wherever time descends from and wraps around you, and smothers you with time’s sweet existence. And no matter how hard you struggle, you can never escape from the warmth of the blanket of time, wrapped around you for what seems like an eternity, and you feeling as though you do not need a blanket, and feeling smothered by the blanket, because you were not even cold in the first place. Sometimes we are cold. Some-times time flies by so fast that the gust of wind it creates makes us shiver with the goosebumps of realization that time is always moving.

In those moments, we wish we had the blanket of time in which to wrap our cold and shivering bodies, because we want those moments to last forever, and they never do, and they never will, and no matter how often or loud we cry, we are left like babies naked on a doorstep with no mother to care for us. And the people inside the house to which the occupied doorstep belongs do not want us either, because if they did, they would have heard us cry, and would have opened the door, taken us into their house, and wrapped us with a damn blanket. But they don’t. (We have no home!) Those moments, the moments when we cry for eternity’s warm embrace, there is no blanket, and we are left cold by the swiftness of time. There are moments that are eternal, however, and they do last forever – or they feel like they last forever, which is the same thing. They are the moments of the incredibly mundane, when no thought or motion comes to my body or mind. They are eternal moments that wrap themselves around my existence and keep me warm with the cozy feelings of forever. And with their eternal warmth of a thousand clock-less suns they suffocate my will to live, my will to breathe, my will to blink – for each blink is a vain and fruitless attempt to measure what is an immeasurable amount of existence and existing in a vacuum of timelessness. Each blink comes down with the entire weight of eternity, and it crushes my soul.

These eternal moments are what I experience everyday at work. As long as I work in this place with the windows in the wall (and for tables), I will live forever – and I will die everyday.