It learns quickly what kind of courtship it’s going to be.  Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine.  It waits, it watches.  If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself-soon it begins to arrive when you do.  But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.

Why should it?  It can wait.  It can stay silent a lifetime.  Who knows anyway what is that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo.  It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by-risk is always hovering somewhere.  But it won’t involve itself with anything less than perfect seriousness. 

From “A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry”

Home suffering a cold and dog bite to my neck and thinking about how nostalgia, childhood, innocence, high school crushes etc. are such a wellspring for lyrics and poetry.  I think when we try to write from the perspective of youth and innocence, we can create a little detour around all the jaded, closed up adult thoughts that get the way of truly universal writing.  Work that shows (not just describes) a genuine openness and vulnerability.  It’s not enough to remember the scene as the adults we are.  In order to get a palpable feel of being there, I think we have to really muse on how we would have written it, or formulated our thoughts back then.  How did it feel when Amy Neff came around the corner of the chemistry lab, unexpectedly, in the 9th grade, in her mustard tights?  How would the 9th grader write that?  I’ve always loved the R.E.M. song Nightswimming (lyrics and video posted below) for this reason.  Even though he writes it from the perspective of looking back from adulthood, you hear the romantic kid in the song.  That’s the real voice and it really puts the listener there with the swimmers.  I’ve had long conversations with fellow songwriters about abandoning traditional verse/chorus/bridge structures for a more flowing, impressionistic feel.  It’s taken me a while to learn the fact that songs don’t need a chorus, they just need some small refrain, some little recognizable repetition.  Stipe, of course being a pop music mastermind, hammers the title and subject of the song home.  It’s got a hooky piano part and cool melody and so everything else can just float freely.  The lyrical style even feels like swimming!  I’ve been trying to write poems with no thought of melody, harmony or consistent rhyme, then try to turn them into songs afterward, by manipulating the phrasing.  It has been huge in freeing me from habits and stale songwriting tricks.  I’m not sure how he wrote it, but it seems like he jotted down some streaming images and then put music it to them.  It feels dreamy, just like the subject matter.  I’m finding that the exercise is a good way to get out of cliche forms and predictable structure.   Enjoy!

Nightswimming.  The official video.  (British Release). 

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

The photograph on the dashboard taken years ago
Turned around backwards so the windshield shows
Every streetlight reveals a picture in reverse
Still it’s so much clearer, I forgot my shirt
At the water’s edge, the moon is low tonight

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
I’m not sure all these people understand
It’s not like years ago, the fear of getting caught
The recklessness and water, they cannot see me naked
These things they go away, replaced by every day

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon, I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun, that bright, tight, forever drum
Could not describe nightswimming

You, I thought I knew you, you I cannot judge
You, I thought you knew me, this one laughing quietly
Underneath my breath, nightswimming

The photograph reflects, every streetlight a reminder
Nightswimming, deserves a quiet night
Deserves a quiet night

Tough is as she does

Won’t you slump on over and stir my shuffle down?

For once devotion is enough

But the walk you whittle another dream another drink

Over in the basement not an inch between

I’m yours and I have to leave

Take care you throaty fare

A shade away and a braid along

Shy a day or two of what I’ve done

What I said I wouldn’t do

This poured out picker through a cold 750

There’s a view I barely see

What if I just showed up tonight

While the crush is crumbling from the tule fog outside

Like the mark your line left without a sound

Let me in and lay me out

Two rooms of yours one with the runner

And the other with the runaway

And vows abound in infidels

Waved along and swept away

I have been a dedicated songwriter for years.  In the last several months, I’ve been reading and writing boatloads of poetry.  I was big into it all though high school and college and somehow just up and stopped writing poems and switched to songs.  Writing without the aid of melody is proving to be a powerful exercise for my songwriting.  I’ve found music can be a crutch that inhibits the writing of tight and interesting lyrics.  Somebody said “songwriting is poetry for cheaters.”  Writing and reading poetry has reminded me how much I love songs with a sense of mystery.  Songs with shadows and curious half-hidden places.  I’ve become much more aware of the rhythm of words and their subtle internal rhymes as well.  The sound of words has always informed how I how I choose to combine them in songs.  But poetry gives me a heightened sense of vowel and consonant sounds and how they might later, suggest a certain melody to me.  Rhythm and phrasing have always been my favorite aspects of music.  But in the writing of poetry, you obviously need to rely heavily on rhythm and meter to make your work feel musical.  Cool things happen in the absence of melody.  In the next few posts, I’ll be sharing the lyrics of songs that I feel would hold their own as poems.   Just off the top of my head, I know already that list will, of course, include the likes of Paul Simon,Tom Waits, Richard Buckner, Leonard Cohen and many others.  Stay tuned.

thevulgar:

I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too…

I had a very fruitful rehearsal with the guitarist in my Brazilian combo last night.  We have been exploring the extensive repetition of specific parts.  We “looped” a favorite section of an instrumental for over an hour.  Some of you may see this as obsessive, potentially boring or just a good way to quickly getting burnt out on your material.  We had the opposite experience.  We just went into autopilot and relaxed into the piece.  Our guitarist often reads chord charts due to the complexity of the changes.  But in a very short time, he was looking away from the music and coming up with gutsy, inspired rhythms and bass runs.   We both found ourselves internalizing the natural shape of the piece, thus freeing us to improvise and fall organically back into place like never before.  This idea is nothing new of course.  I have done lots of work with this sort of repetition in my own practice.  But this felt more performance based.  We were abandoning any attachment to our previous ideas of how the thing should go.  It was cathartic, freeing and got us out of our heads.  When we finally played the whole piece at the end, the whole thing (even the part we didn’t repeat) sounded so much stronger. 

When we perform or rehearse a whole piece all the way through, all those juicy little details we love so much are passing by only once.  They go by far too quickly to allow them to get tighter (or more relaxed) and develop.  We are just practicing stagnancy this way.  Isn’t the definition of insanity “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?”.  By extensive repetition, as if reciting a mantra while meditating, we let ourselves disappear into the music with a new, relaxed confidence.  And there will indeed be “different results” because we are shifting and evolving our ideas subtly with each repetition!  Better yet, there’s no cloying hunger for the whole piece to sound better…because it IS getting better on its own.  There’s no grasping or holding on to ideas because you know it’s just going to come right back around.  Of course this will result in fewer “mistakes” and even the “mistakes” often become the most fun and often brilliant part.  I wish I knew who said this, but I love this quote:  “you can’t BECOME successful, you can only BE successful”.

A nice trick is to play most of the piece the same way each time but pick a small section of perhaps a few measures to vary then move to the next section.  This can work with singing as well.  Try singing a song with one other band member.  And just loop the same verse over and over.  Play with phrasing, breath, dynamics, emphasis, placement etc.  Sing in falsetto, imitate James Brown, whisper, drop an octave or a third.  Play!  You’ll be amazed at how much it can teach you and pull you out of your ruts.  Recording your sessions is smart as you will undoubtedly come up with brilliant, instinctive ideas. 

Stick to the same part and don’t let go.  You may soon find that letting go is inevitable.   

I’ll leave you with my favorite Zen proverb:

“From one thing, 10,000 things are learned.”

You can reach me at www.zakborden.com 

Have fun.

Simon ‘Do Pandeiro’ Lucas and myself sitting in with choro masters Dudu Maia and Douglas Lora.  A joy and an honor. 

12 weeks, 12 keys.  Some tips on hitting the “hard stuff”.

So it’s week four of my project to study a different major key every week for 12 weeks.  Some friends and students have been joining me and doing what they can.  I realize this is an ambitious undertaking even if you just do a little in each key.  People have lives and can’t sit around obsessing about the key of F#.  I’ve had busy couple of weeks and barely got to E flat at all.  It’s a process.  We do the best we can.  But in the interest of not further scaring folks off, here are a few things that have helped me when studying the less intuitive keys. 

• Give yourself a break: master one octave at a time. Learn how to play a simple melody or scale pattern in one octave.  Listen!  Relax.  Enjoy how the notes may sound different than the key of C.  Then, staying in that same octave, start that same series of notes starting on a different finger.

• You can use this same approach when dealing with chords as well.  Flesh out all the possibilities with a simple 2 or 3-chord relationship in one spot on the neck using the closest inversions.  Then move up to a new inversion and play the same relationship.  This will open many possibilities for you. 

• Remember that the series of chords in a ‘weird key’ are usually just a half step up from the chords you normally play.  By studying in these keys, we wean ourselves from chords, scales and licks that require open strings.  Thus, helping us to play universal patterns.  These are also the same patterns that exist for the easier keys further up the neck.  This can be a great metaphor for breaking all sorts of unhealthy pattern in our lives!  The solution is usually a lot closer to us than we think.  That can be a real comfort.   

• Always take a look at its neighbor next door.  If you look at the key of F, it only has one flat.  It is spelled F G A Bb C D E.  Notice that when you play in F# you then sharp everything except the B.  So F# G# A# B C# D# E#.  This at least helps to get a handle on where everything is located.

• The great mandolinist Peter Martin shared with me a great quote from Paul Anastasio:  “There are no difficult keys, only unfamiliar ones.”  Again, good advice for life right?!  We are only afraid of things that we don’t practice and understand.  Know F# and know thyself.

• All keys are basically the same.  They just start in a different place.  Knowing how these ‘different places’ lay out is the real key.  This is the key of flexibility and more freedom.  Ok…before I get too spiritual, I’ll leave you to it!  : )  Have fun.  Life is short.