Songwriting
We open the door to the Guitar Center, and there’s a colorful swirl of every kind of guitar hung up on the walls. I’m pretty giddy because I know I’m going to walk out with one. Jake had already been playing for a few years, which is why I asked him to take me.
“Ok so give me the run down. Brands? Price range? Anything else to know?”
“Dude I don’t know shit about guitars.”
“Jake what the fuck”
“Just get the guitar that every time you look at it, you just need to pick it up and play it.”
This happened exactly a year ago, December 23, 2015. The guitar I bought was the first, and still only, instrument I’ve learned. Likewise, I also only began to sing when I started playing. I could never stand to hear my singing voice by itself, so I never did it. But once I started playing, I got a lot more comfortable, because at least the nice guitar notes drowned out my shit voice.
Learning to sing and play guitar at the same time felt pretty natural to me, because I wanted to play my favorite songs, and to hear the songs, I needed the words too. I learned how to play all the basic chords, and suddenly I could play almost any song. It was magic. I spent so much of my adolescence listening to Blink and other pop punk bands that I don’t even want to say (even though you know them), and jumping around my bedroom air guitaring and lip singing the shit out of them, imagining I was actually playing and singing. I did this for years, so to finally have this fantasy realized shattered my reality.
There were so many times I would sing and play chords, pause, realize what I was doing, look at myself through the closet mirror next to me, and freak the fuck out. I would literally be bouncing in my seat, squeezing my eyes shut as hard as I could, clenching my teeth, smacking my desk violently with my hand, squealing and cussing loudly in delight. Those are the kinds of moments that kind of convince me that I could die right now and be happy.
I was addicted. Consumed.
For months I played and sang for about 4 or 5 hours a day. Gaps between every lecture were optimized for playing time. I’d write down in my calendar “Don’t play guitar today you piece of shit” so that I would actually do my coding assignments. I’d sit in random public spots on campus singing and playing, not giving a shit about what passersby thought of me. I would even do it on the fucking bus rides to and from school. Picture that. Like a bus full of students on their way to their next destination, and then just me sitting there strumming and belting my lungs out. It was cringeworthy. I was that guy, and I sucked! I should have been really embarrassed, but the way I looked at it, I was having more fun than whoever was judging me, so I didn’t care. And I’m pretty sure I entertained people. Whether they enjoyed the music, or enjoyed making fun of me, I at least gave them a break from thinking about the stressful things that occupy the headspace of a student.
Anyway, after getting good with basic chords, and seeing how most songs are structured with them, I realized “Wait a minute. I can make shit now.” So I did. I wrote my first song less than a month after I started playing. I didn’t really know anything about music (I still don’t..), and yet I wrote a song that had verses, a bridge, and a chorus, and loved it. The joy of writing one song stopped me from learning other songs almost entirely. It felt better to create. I’d play a chord progression and hum random improvised melodies into my phone. I’d improvise tweak it, record that, and repeat. Then when I was happy, I’d add lyrics. A year later, I have 8 songs that I haven’t completely trashed.
Songwriting is one of my favorite things to do now. It has, in a lot of ways, come to define me. Before I wrote my first melody or lyric, music was already an integral part of my life, but poetry wasn’t. I had written and read some poems before, but it wasn’t a thing I’d casually do. Songwriting awakened the poet in me. God damn I feel so pretty.
The poetry aspect is super satisfying for a lot of reasons:
1. There’s a high meaning to word count ratio
Writing is an optimization problem. You usually try use as few words as possible to say as much as possible. In emails, essays, or blog posts, you need to be super clear about everything. But it’s different with poetry. Since words can be left more open to interpretation, they need not make perfect sense, and you can cram even more meaning into them, as long as it makes sense to you. Mmm so information dense..
2. I can better capture ambiguity
This is pretty close to number 1. It lets me capture more complexity and depth of emotion in an elegant way that prose can’t really touch. There are some lines and stanzas in my songwriting that have like three different meanings going on simultaneously. I get to swirl different emotions that don’t seem like they go together, and solidify them into a single gem that I can twirl around in the light to see the different facets.
3. I’m able to appreciate how words sound
In normal writing you don’t care much about phonics. But with poetry in songwriting, you choose words not just by meaning but also by the ring to them when you sing it. There are some words I rarely use in real life, but sound so cool when enunciated that they help create the feeling of a song.
4. I grow my vocabulary
In conversation we employ the ‘good enough’ rule, where your grammar or word choice doesn’t need to be perfect in order to get your point across. But in poetry you’re creating a crystalized thing, so you’re kinda striving for perfection. I find myself toiling over every little phrase looking for the word with the perfect connotation. I dig up words and their obscure synonyms that are in my passive vocabulary, and even if they don’t make it in the song, the whole process reminds me of those cool words I forgot about.
5. I learn about and grow closer to myself
Writing poetry, at least for me, is vomiting the strongest feelings I’ve ever had. There’s so much introspection and meditation that goes on when I’m writing songs. I’m thinking about everything that’s ever happened to me, trying to remember people, places, events, and feelings in the greatest detail, and tapping into emotional wells that have been steadily filled throughout my life. Sometimes I won’t even realize I feel something until a song has formed around the feeling. It feels mystical.
And so, to commemorate this past year of newfound passion and personal growth, I offer you my most recently kind-of-finished-but-not-really song. I only came up with the chorus three weeks ago. I still need to flesh it out with other instruments and change some things, but there’s enough of the skeleton of the song for me to play it. I’m pretty fearless when it comes to doing shit like practicing in buses, but letting you listen to this recording requires a lot more bravery, because you get a copy of my unfinished art and shitty singing that you technically have forever.
So Happy Holidays goddammit. This is a fucking gift.
Lick Your Mind
I couldn’t find another cigarette
Who would’ve thought that I already found me?
Maybe this high just hasn’t hit me yet
Thoughts cycle faster than these eyes can read
I still don’t know if I
Although I think that you can feel it
Wait now
I think I feel it too
You’re facing
The horizon
You’re feasting
Your eyes and
Those faces
Mesmerizing
Their smiles lick
Your mind
I find it so hard to believe
This stretch seems farther than the sea
Things need not be so troubling
Did you forget to look behind it
In the background
Flowing gold dancing on the ripples
Lead to the circle cut slowly by the line
Asymptotic aspiration, simple
Imperfection’s still a pleasant state of mind
Beauty begs agency
How do we want our worlds to be?
Where do we even begin?
You’re facing
The horizon
You’re feasting
Your eyes and
Those faces
Mesmerizing
Their smiles lick
Your mind
He never found it anyway
And even then he couldn’t stay
Who would’ve thought you wouldn’t see it
Through the happenings of the day
And though we’ve yet to hit the wall
You already have it all
It’s nicer when you actually see it
And yell it to me
I find it so hard to believe
This stretch seems farther than the sea
Things need not be so troubling
Did you forget to look behind it
In the background
You’re facing
The horizon
You’re feasting
Your eyes and
Those faces
Mesmerizing
Their smiles lick
Your mind
