I'm Reaching For This Thing

And it's fuckin' whack is what it is.

I've wiped the slate completely clean as a gesture of faith in myself. I've broken free of any constraints and come back to music from the ass-side, realizing that life is simply too long for one to be writing verse-chorus-verse for the fullness of this dance. I moved to a different instrument and chained myself to the bench to ignite a bit of ability and agility.

From 2000 to 2002 I wrote nothing but string quartets in an effort to enforce some voice-leading and inner-voice motion in my compositional brain. The only studio recordings I did were live piano-and-voice. Oh, man is that a bitch. No hiding on that crap.

I keep trying to ignore the voice that keeps me from really going over the top and doing these honey-coated romance art songs that are, quite honestly, quite mincing. I can't help but feel that there's something in that direction that would be relevant and striking. I listen to a lot of the crooner-era and 30's songs, the Kern and Rodgers and Hart and Cole and all that shit and there's a lot of freedom in the strophic character of the songs. And listening to those god damn singers like Edith Piaf and Billie and Satch is surely a study in the nature of entertainment. Just simple, one-on-one entertainment.

The entertainers that, you put 'em up on stage with a matchbook a rock and a piece of string, three hours later you'll still be sobbing and sighing. When it's pulled out of thin air like that it's a thing of wonder. And they don't talk much in front of people. They do it all with the songs. A thing of wonder.

So I'm reaching for that thing. That's all. Whether I fall out of a window tomorrow or stagger along like this for dozens of years, I'm sick of boring shit. Maybe it's a function of age. And speaking of which, I want to use the dozens of years of moving around, of seeing shit, of being all over the world. I want shit in there about Venice and Cadiz and Riomaggiore and Berlin and Bogota and La Paz and Helsinki.

I'm reaching for the thing that is suffused with all of this. I can't even hear what it sounds like yet. Usually when I can hear what a thing is supposed to sound like I can track it down in 2 years. This one, I don't know. Could be a couple, could be ten. Maybe I'll wake up with it tomorrow. Maybe I'll fucking biff it and it will never come about. Like all those great bands that broke up too soon and all that wasted potential and all those relationships ending and you can hear what that band would have done in your head but it'll never be. Never.

Worse yet, I might never get it at all. Maybe I'm not talented enough. Maybe my universal appeal to the rest of humanity just doesn't exist. Just doesn't exist. Maybe that's a bit of a problem. If I don't get it at all it would be the worst.

See, what I think about when I think about What I'll Leave Behind is different from what you think about. All I can do is do what I do and play it for people and put it in a sea chest and hope that 100 years from now people might dig it. So it has to be really somethin'. Somethin' good. And it has to be something that you can have that whenever there's a piano you can take people further outside of themselves than they ever thought possible. Like the god damn kid in Tin Drum there.

So you can't just verse-chorus-verse it.

With music, anything you can hear in your head you can do if you are a careful and sensitive steward. And that's a crazy god damned thing because- in your head? Dude, you can hear some dope-ass shit in your head. Everybody knows that. We're human beings. We're all conceptualists. What those composers and interpreters share is that quality of sensitive stewardship which is probably my favorite human quality in all its many forms.

Isn't that just the god damnedest fucking thing?