I absolutely love music. All kinds. To look at my CD collection (oh, that sounds so dated...to look at my iTunes playlist) you would think I had multiple personalities. I have everything from Dr. Dre to Garth Brooks to Limp Bizkit to Colby Callait. I pretty much like anything with a decent beat, but I am especially partial to songs with great lyrics. Give me a great story in song form and I will give you a concert. Not a good one, mind you, because I don’t really think that I sing very well, but dammit I try! In chasing my music making dream I learned to play the guitar a couple of years ago. Well, let me amend that. I took a guitar class. And for a couple of months, I practiced, developed wicked calluses on my fingers and could actually play what started to sound like music. Then the class ended, I moved to California and my guitar has been on its stand on display in my living room ever since. I am pretty sure the dust mites have played it more than I have.
Since I was about 11 or 12, another great love of mine has been writing. I started writing what I realize now to be HORRIBLE pubescent angst-filled poetry when I was in 5th grade. Each night I poured my soul out to my journal in iambic pentameter, fancying myself the next Maya Angelou. (Going through some old boxes I recently found the first collection of poetry that I wrote. It was bad. Laughably bad. But what the hell, I was 12!). As I got older, I had this idea in the back of my head to combine my loves of words and music. Inspired by the Lilith Fair generation of guitar toting, tortured artist-type, female musicians, I have harbored this fantasy of writing a song. Something smooth and soulful. Melancholy yet beautiful. How hard could it be, right?
So, I set about my activity for today hopeful and inspired. I didn’t want to be tempted (consciously or subconsciously) to plagiarize so I didn’t really listen to any music for a couple of days. Which is REALLY hard, especially if you spend any time in the car. But I had ideas bubbling in my head. I was quickly convincing myself that I was about to write the next Grammy winning hit. After I put the baby down for his nap (and knowing that might only give me an uninterrupted hour, two if I was really lucky), I dragged out my most recent (albeit several years old) notebooks of poetry. Flipping through the pages, I thought to myself, some of this ain't half bad. BUT...none of it sounded like a song. My original thought was to take something I had already written and change it a bit to put it in "song form" (whatever the hell that means). Half an hour of browsing my work led me to the conclusion that that particular strategy may not work. OK, I can do this. I decided to start from scratch. One idea for a song that I had been toying with was inspired by Facebook and all of the people that I have reunited with through the site. You know, something about people coming back into your life, life coming full circle, that kinda shit. That could be a good song right? Well if it is, it never made its way out of my (apparently non-musical) head.
After a day of toiling away in front of a (relatively) blank piece of paper, I now understand why Diane Warren is so special (if you don’t know who she is, Google her. My guess is that you know her, you just don’t KNOW that you do...) I realized that part of the problem is that I have no musical ability whatsoever. My aforementioned guitar lessons only taught me to play other people's already written songs. I know nothing about putting together melodies. Which makes songwriting a nearly impossible task! So the end of the day arrives and I have a couple of new poems (pretty good ones I think!) but I am no closer to that award winning song I know is lurking inside me. I can’t begin to express how disappointed I was. Part of me wants to just slap some new lyrics on an old tune and say I wrote a song. But that’s kind of cheating isn’t it? And I guess the whole point of this 35 day thing isn’t necessarily to totally succeed at everything you try (but dammit I HATE to lose). So I have decided that even though it wasn’t finished today, I will keep working on this song. I have a couple of friends who are pretty musical....and although they don’t know it yet, they WILL be helping me with this one! So maybe you will see me get that Grammy by the time I am 36.....
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