Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

songwriting

Guitarness

by

I’m often at a loss for what to do with myself when we visit Elise’s families in New Jersey. At home, or at any friend’s house, my default position is guitar playing – it gives me something to do with my hands in idle moments so that I don’t feel like I have to carry on a non-stop conversation at all times.

I don’t usually bring my guitar with me to NJ, which means the families haven’t witnessed this particular phenomenon too often, but Elise was planning to leave me marooned while she went on a wedding dress tour, and I needed a way to pass the time. I added a wonderful new “print-version” feature to my lyrics database, so for the trip I printed out sheaf of my fifty most incomplete songs to workshop while Elise was out on her wedding whirlwind.

Isn’t that a little crazy – fifty songs that are unfinished and still relatively new?

I really vacillate about this sort of thing. At this point Gina and I have a solid sixteen song set, and I have ten or twenty of my strongest songs that go in and out of solo rotation. It’s a comfortable point to be at, but then I look at my freaking database and I see all of these unfinished songs – some of which I really adore and like to play, such as they are in their unfinished state. And, since my current setlist is heavily influenced by my 2003-04 stuff, there are incomplete songs hanging around that are about to be four years old.

Four years old! Which is a problem when I have a whole new fleet of unfinished songs to be working through – I only have so much headspace to to to push these things forward. So, I sat down with my sheaf today and had a touch of a workshop. I re-notated a few things in a more complete fashion, and I think finished one from 2001 – “4th of July” – once and for all.

All that rehearsal meant I was plenty limber for my post-dinner conversational gambit. Except, these are people who aren’t used to my schtick – that I like sit and underscore a conversation without needing anyone to pay attention to me, and that if there’s a lull I might sing for a bit before tucking my voice back under the din.

It made for a few awkward moments … I don’t know that Elise’s father has ever heard me play my own songs before? Certainly not songs about his daughter, anyhow. But, they won’t be getting rid of me anytime soon so they might as well get used to the incessant underscoring of my life. Along the way I turned in possibly my best vocal of all time on the bridge of “Love Me Not,” and also a very respectable version of the recently on-hiatus “Little Love.”

All of which is why I need to go home tomorrow and record a Trio. And then I need to record another another one. And then another. And so on.

Right. But, first I need to drink this glass of wine. And maybe another one.

G’nite.

Endlessly Avoiding Perfection

by

Heading East recently shared a theory that each artist has only a single great “story” inside of them waiting to be released. A particular quote really resonated:

Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short…

Though I don’t agree completely with the one-story-only theory, I do believe that each artist has a limited amount of ways to portray any single given archetype within their sphere of art, with each attempt a facet of a perfected portrayal. As alluded to in the quote, the artist has a choice (though not always a conscious one) of spending a lifetime drafting an incomplete version of their truth, or of crafting one version that is crystalline in its perfection.

I certainly feel that way about songwriting. I used to specialize in a particularly jilted sort of breakup song that I spent most of my time writing and re-writing. Suddenly, early in 2005 i wrote “Regrets,” and I was suddenly no longer bound to tap and retap that archetype for my material. Since then my songs have expressed a much wider array of emotions – I freed myself by closing a door on a particular story.

Penning that perfect story is a frightening concept; what if you finish it too soon? What if you don’t have any other important stories to tell? Yet, as daunting as those questions are, if you let them handicap your creativity you’ll never attain that perfect story. And that means you’ll never get to try your hand at its sequel.

My Favorite Trio Tracks: #2 – Granted (from Trio Season 4, #2)

by

While surveying my Trios for this list of favorites tracks I decided against including the fully-mixed songs from the middle of Season 4. Though they appeared in Trio they didn’t adhere to the spirit of Trio – I built them piece by piece from a click track rather than recording them live.

Except for “Granted.”

“Granted” came to me in the middle of the night. I awoke, bolt upright, crying, and reached for a piece of paper. The next thing I remember was crossing out a line in the final verse, and the next thing after that was getting through a guitar/vocal version of the song in a single take.

What could be more quintessentially Trio than that?

After hearing the guitar/vocal I realized that a lot more had come to me than just the basic structure of the song. Without even thinking about it I added a lattice of background vocals and guitars around the original demo, replacing some of them in the coming days with more polished versions. The end result was one of my most professional-sounding tracks of all time, which wound up as the opening track of Trio Season 4, #2.

As a song “Granted” exists across opposing worlds – awake and asleep, alive and slipping away. Now you can hear it two different ways for the first time – fully polished and completely naked. At the core of each is my voice, hoarse at 3am from waking up crying, singing words straight from a legal pad pockmarked with arrows and crossouts.

I love this song so much that I’m afraid to hear it any other way.

My Favorite Trio Tracks: #11 – World In My Hand (from Trio Season 3, #7)

by

Today’s song is “World In My Hand,” originally recorded in January of 2003 for Trio Season 3, #7.

When I wrote it in 1998, “World In My Hand” was my first “hit,” in a manner of speaking.

At the time I had only been writing songs for a few months, and only playing for about a year, but when I wrote the lyrics out on the first page of my new poetry notebook I knew I had tapped into something both more personal and more universal than anything I had previously written.

As my songwriting has become more and more refined my older songs have a tendency to drop off of my setlists – especially songs I wrote before college. Yet, no matter how much my songs evolve, this one will always be a favorite.

And it’s mucked up that I can’t decide… ?

by

Gina and I just came from a rehearsal with the Melange Theatre house band for our appearance at the September 20th show. The band rocks, and thus we will rock mightily. I hope you’ve bought your ticket.

During the course of said rehearsal I received my first ever request to censor a lyric. The lyric in question is in “Wait,” and goes as follows:

You call me on the phone
and I wish I pretended I wasn’t home,
’cause every time I hear your voice
I let you get too close.
You twist my guts up baby,
and it’s fucked up how we can’t deny
these feelings for long enough
to avoid climbing on for another ride

They asked very nicely, yet I still went into fight or flight mode. Why take out the “fuck” when the song has other gems in it like “next thing I know you’ll come over and stain the sheets”? Is the use of fuck, not even referring to fucking, any more explicit than that line?

The real issue is not that I want to say fuck so bad, but that “fucked up” maintains the assonance on the line, and the device is not satisfied by “effed up,” “messed up,” or “screwed up,” which were so helpfully suggested by others at the rehearsal.

Also, it provides an emphatic point for me to rejoin Gina on harmony, which was one of the reasons we split up the vocals the way we did in the first place.

(At the time I snapped defensively at the change I didn’t realize that I had all of those reasons running through my head, but now that I’m sitting down to write they’re all plain as day, which is exactly the problem with censorship – sometimes content is only part of the intent, and changing one piece of it to a soothing alternate often has a bigger impact than intended.)

If it was a song other than “Wait” I think I’d probably cut it from the set rather than change the line, because I don’t like the precedent it sets for further artistic direction. However, we really like to play “Wait,” and the band liked to play “Wait,” and we don’t really have another tune that fills the same sort of sonic space. So, I’m probably going to change it.

What to, I’m not sure. Suggestions welcomed.