Futile Horn

02.08.2004 - 5:45 am (hey, my job is tedious too)

Yeah so. Writing songs is depressing. If you write a crappy one, you have the knowledge you’ve added to the sky-scraping pile of cultural refuse. You can live with that though, because some people do that for a living, and you just did it for a hobby and you’ve had enough sense to put it in the crap bin where it belongs. But sometimes you fuck up and write a good one. That’s really depressing because… well, I dunno why, but for me it’s a sour note that lasts for days.

So I think I wrote a good one. Just listening to the chord progression in whole notes nearly makes me want to cry, and I feel it is usually words and not tonality that moves me. It was fairly calculated. There are major chords where your ear wants to hear minor chords, and it sort of feels like it is floating between keys or rather perhaps it feels like a key that is a bad key, and then suddenly there’s a chord from a totally different key that makes the previous chords feel like they should have been in that key. In fact all the music that’s past which was badness suddenly becomes rectified into goodness, and it feels like a weight has been lifted off your soul, or rather like a huge thorn has been pulled out the flesh of your spirit, and the wound heals instantly and what was sick has become well.

Anyway, that’s how I hear it.

And that’s how I keep hearing it. I hear it constantly in my head as I walk around town, sorta floating back into my memory and then drifting away again, so I can’t quite remember how it went.

I wrote some words for it. Rather I wrote some words, and then loaned the chords to the words and gave them a suitable melody. And the words are about whomever they are about. And then I started thinking, I’ve written a fair amount of songs, some about other people, some about nobody at all, and some about personal experiences and feelings. I try to consider these things as objectively as I can, and of course you can’t be truly objective about the things you create, but you do the best you can. And when I do that, I realize that the last type, the ones about me, those are the ones that are pretty bad.

First of all that is frustrating, especially if you are someone like me who generally feels misunderstood. I mean, I don’t want to make friends, I don’t even want sympathy; just for a moment or two I want someone to get it. And I realize I haven’t really given someone something to get.

But next, I blame the subject matter. During the time in which I wrote things besides songs, I would realize that once I got myself out of myself and onto paper in front of me, all of my concerns and passions and experiences became boring. I felt the need to defend myself, and I couldn’t convince even me, who at least knew the better half of the story.

Tonight I saw American Splendor, the movie about Harvey Pekar, a man who manages to make his life as a file clerk, perhaps the most uninteresting profession ever devised, into a cult underground comic book, and now into one of most critically acclaimed movies (deservedly) of last year.

You keep hearing the advice, write what you know. I’ve started to feel I do much better when I make shit up. Or at least, if I pretend I don’t exist while I write whatever is left that I know. But what is the point of that? Can’t I allow myself a little self-indulgence and not ruin the whole stew? Especially if someone else can make a terrific stew out of nothing but?

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn