In late June I started writing songs after a dry spell of many years. The melodies and the lyrics are just popping up and I am letting them, giving them a space to be alive and change and grow. I am tending to them as I would a poem or any writing, but the process is different—a fluid exchange between set ideas and improvisation. It often starts with a melody and a couplet or two, and then expands as the music takes shape, because the written words on the page don’t tell the whole story.
The Roller Coaster is the third “finished” song this month, the first recording I want to share. It all started out with four lines that didn’t make it to the finished work. Those (ultimately discarded) lines formed the framework of the melody, which gave birth to the first lines of the finished song (and the concept as a whole). It was written over the course of a week, and this recording (the third in the process) was made on July 31st.
Musically, I’m in a strange place. My ear is better than it’s ever been, and my vision for what I want to do is clear. But i’m out of practice, and it takes real work to get what I hear in my brain out onto the tape. When it happens successfully, It’s a true and absolute joy. One thing I’ve been surprised by is how much the skills i’ve learned over the past several years doing non-music projects have made me a better songwriter. Things like: working incrementally and iteratively, taking breaks when things aren’t working, putting time in when it feels right AND when it doesn’t, practicing, accepting where I’m at, Taking risks.
My goal is to release a record before the year is through, but right now I’m focused on shepherding these songs into the world. I have faith that they will all come together in a way that makes sense to me, and hope that I can form them into a work that resonates with others, too.
The scene of a hundred or more “rollercoaster” takes.
The Roller Coaster
I’ve been getting high again just to come back down. All the turns you took me in turned me inside out.
As we fall, that’s all there is— I can’t even see. At the top I’m losing it, I can barely breathe.
Feels like I am going to die as I strap on in to face the fear and feel what’s here, not what might have been.
Four nights ago I heard the sweet call of fantastic vision. Hope of a life well-lived and uniquely played.
And rest.
But sunrise brought a flaming terror, and burned out the peace I had tended to over so many previous dawns. The pain of loss (not now, but soon) drove me to pull what remained.
But I have begun to dig in this new, hard ground. Cultivating the seeds of an invasive peace that thrives in the cracks between stones and spreads beyond intention.
The lump—that deep twist in my gut. I am holding too tight, even as I let go. Scooping out my melon of a belly, emptying it of everything, including hunger.
You don’t care for watermelon but I continue to present it, bowl after bowl. An offering, a show of just how far I am willing to go.
As unappealing as my misplaced entrails and the hunger that is and isn’t.
