The Cemetery

I’m walking through the cemetery, through gravestone rows, feet sinking into soft turf, into the earth below, toward the bodies returning, having been returned.

I wish these gravestones told me more. The rhetoric of love and heaven hardly makes an argument. I’m curious about the life that lay shrouded behind the name. I want to know more than the dates that bordered each existence. A life is such an ocean of feeling, such a frenzy of events. What were these people passionate about? What was it like to be in a room with them? How were they kind? How did they hurt people?

I could spend an hour a day here then, taking in these histories.

I watch an airplane rise into the sky. I see it tilt and turn southward, shrinking into the distance. I follow carefully as it withers to a tiny glimmer on endless blue, until I can’t hold it any longer, until I suddenly blink and my eyes open to an empty sky.

There are sections here of stones marking where children have been buried - infants - two or three day winks of consciousness. Most of these slight flashes into the universe occurred more than fifty years ago, yet there are flowers set before several graves. I can picture a mother, now very old, still carrying with her that void, that aching space her lost baby left her. I imagine her knelt there in late morning, alone, alone for acres, alone for light-years, for millennia - her long skirt flapping in hot quiet wind.

The sun hammers on blazing car roofs, inching through traffic in the distance. Trucks rattle by, landscaping equipment in tow, metal teeth gnashing. A funeral procession comes with the buzzing of motorcycle cops. I lower my head and lift my gaze from time to time, caught in the eyes of those driving past.

I descend a steep hill, careful, slow, overcome with the reality of this place, with awareness of death, of all the mourning yet to come.

I try to feel the ground as I walk. When you start breaking away your defense mechanisms, you feel the internal weather system all the time. You can’t fight a storm, you can only wait it out, then inspect the damage and from what damage it came.

I think about the emotions that burn. Anger, Anxiety, Anguish, Grief, Fear, Shame, and on and on... Each of these flares up differently, on different latitudes of our bodies. For me, Grief smolders. Grief sends smoke upwards on each side of the spine, it burns quiet like the embers of a campfire on a vast, dark, lonely, plain.

These fires are raging across our planet, spreading from city to city, nation to nation, person to person, moment to moment, era to era. I stand here in the cemetery and this is all I can think about. We are a species ablaze. We are a world engulfed in flames.

Some Thoughts On Writing Songs

An old friend of mine wrote and asked me about my process and approach to songwriting. I thought I'd share my response here as well:

You have this vast reservoir of artistic intention that you need to somehow express, and it is being held back by a giant dam, allowing just a little water through at any moment. Most of the time this massive block functions to funnel that excess of feeling down into a slow trickle so you can perceive everything as it passes by and choose what you want to work with. Sometimes though, the dam may be constructed with negativity: fear, perfectionism, self-imposed or society-imposed ideals of what a song should be, laziness, self-destruction, self-sabotage... Keep an eye on it. The better you know yourself, the better you will understand the limitations of your creativity.

Most of my songs happen in this slow trickling process. I’ll often spend a year on a song, tossing around lyrical ideas, trying to fill in the gaps. Sometimes I look at the process as an attempt to solve a puzzle - some songs feel as though they have already been written in some mysterious way, and I simply have to go searching for the pieces. Being patient and allowing for the right element to come to you is an approach that works well for me, as does writing drafts and editing.

Sometimes though, there’s a flood. You’ll feel compelled to pick up your guitar and it will suddenly all rush out at once. A lot of times I’ll find that these sorts of moments happen around subject matter that I hadn’t intended to write about -Things that had been waiting in the shadows, needing to be expressed. Other times I just yank a lucky stone from the dam and the whole thing crumbles as one thought leads to the next. Knowing what you’re writing about helps with this, as does finding a theme or a hook that you can follow through the song, though that’s not always necessary.

* * *

When people ask me how I write my songs I tell them that I don't have a singular method, but it usually forms from a seed that grows into the final product. The seed could be a lyric I've been thinking of, a concept or insight I feel like I should express, a story I want to tell, an experience I’ve had, a chord progression or guitar lick that I'd like to build around, a melody that feels good, a beat, a new instrument that I want to try to write with, and on and on... Sometimes I'll have an emotional charge that I want to express - I'll want to yell, so I write a song that tears apart my vocal chords to get to that feeling. In the past I've had songwriting assignments, where I’ve been asked to attempt to write something for movies or commercials, and I like those challenges as they provide a framework and motivation that I wouldn’t have been able to impose on myself - though too much constraint can sometimes suffocate your work. Whatever the seed is that you plant, you have to cultivate your song, pay attention to what it needs and what you need from it.

To build around that initial seed, I usually begin by trying some random chords and singing nonsense over them, which will eventually evolve into a structure of rhythm and melody and rhyme. The attitude and speed of the song will start to show as well. Then I’ll have a constrained space to write lyrics in: a part of the process that, for me, tends to happen on a drive or a walk or in a conversation with a friend as often as it happens while sitting with my guitar. I don’t usually write lyrics down, they come together slow enough that I remember the good ones, and the rest just get filtered away.

You will inevitably end up with a heap of scrap parts: verses with no choruses, choruses with no verses, random scattered lyrics and music... There isn’t a need to force those unique parts into a full song right at this moment. Keep them around, revisit them, and you’ll find places for many to live - their counterparts simply have not been born yet. Often times I’ll realize that I haven't been able to finish a song because I haven’t yet lived through the conclusion, had a realization that led to the core message, or my skill at a certain musical element hadn’t yet been strong enough. It takes some faith in the song to see it through at such a glacial pace. It takes a lot of trial and error.

* * *

You’ll probably begin with writing in a sort of conversation with the whole canon of music that has come before you. It’s great to be influenced and inspired by other artists, but make sure to look for the things that are really “you” and showcase those, develop them with time. Dropping musical references in your songs can get a bit like dropping names - it might open some doors for you, but not from a genuine place, so it might not remain satisfying for long. I’d always advise someone to keep their song from being one more echo of a fleeting trend. Be you, even if it isn’t cool right now.

* * *

Songs are an interesting intersection of so many things, of rhythm, of melody, of poetic rhyme and meter, of performance, of concept, story, arrangement, etc... Musicians are an interesting crowd because, even though everyone has all of these abilities available to them, everyone has refined their skills in different ways and to different degrees. Some musicians are athletes who can play with record breaking speed and precision or sing on perfect pitch, some are mathematicians who can conceive the angles of a symphony on a bar napkin, some are actors who must show you and perform for you the meaning of what they are saying, and of course there are poets, there are comedians, marketers, party promoters, thieves, revolutionaries, prophets... Everyone has a different approach and passion and belief about what's important. That's how so many songs can exist together, uniquely, in the world.

Any of these separate elements can be endlessly refined on their own. There is an infinite amount of searching to do within the assemblage of words, from their meaning to the quality they have on the tongue. There is an infinite amount of work you can do on scales, on timing, and on breaking out of the rules of those techniques that have arbitrarily been built up around us. You must explore these infinities as you grow, but you need not become a master of any domain to write a great song. That whole 10,000 hours of practice thing - that's an interesting observation on what it takes to have opportunities and excel in a competitive landscape at this point in time in our society as far as technical skill goes, but art is not the same as skill and technique. I believe that you can make great art right now while you’re developing your craft.

This leads me to a quick side-note on competition: it’s a trap. You are in a process, you are on your own path and you need not wrestle to move forward. It takes discipline, not violence. Don't compete with yourself, and especially don't compete with others. Our society judges art as a commodity, on economic markets - virtue in art is too often measured in sales, or perceived monetary value, or status through fame or fleeting hype. It seems like we can only fully appreciate something in this culture if we've turned it into a product, if it gets love from professional critics, if enough people click a button that says they "like" it, if it can be judged on a scale, can have power over something else... Stay away from that if you can, even if you're making your living from your songs. It will only be an excuse to hurt yourself and hurt others. Everyone's taste in music is different, and everyone's taste is right. No one wins. Write for you, because you love music, love expressing yourself, love the challenge, love yourself - and be proud as you grow. All of this I’ve learned the hard way.

Art happens inside of you, in your mind and heart and perceptions, and you can refine different tools (technique, skill, craft) to turn all of that abstract feeling and vision into something concrete. I think that one of the most important elements of songwriting is being able to feel for those piercing moments, for when something mysteriously plucks a heart string or gets the blood pumping. There is no recipe for that, that’s the art of it, and over time you’ll know how to encourage those moments to blossom, to explode. You know what gets you, what lyrics, what melodies, what rhythms and textures give you chills. Recognize when you’re delivering those feelings.

* * *

Write all the time, from every approach that you can. Take it slow, let it unravel at its own pace. Have faith in yourself and the song. Don't force it, and try not to be hard on yourself. Enjoy it. If it isn't coming together in one moment, set it aside before you get frustrated and come back to it later. I probably am able to finish one in every couple dozen songs that I begin - not every one of them makes it to the surface. Be patient, allow the seed to sprout and take root before it grows too tall - take the time to examine each individual branch and leaf. Then eventually, share your song and experience it as it is experienced by others.

And that of course would lead us into another discussion...

Worlds

While we wish to change the world for the better, often neglecting ourselves on some frenzy toward martyrdom or power, I think it's important to remember that there is a world inside of me, inside of you, and these worlds can actually be changed. If there is such thing as a better world, then I imagine it to be the sum of these individual changes. Every day, six billion times over.

Look At How Far You've Come

Sometimes you don’t realize how dark it got until you turn around and look at the ascent you’ve made to rise out of it.

Every challenge, every destructive pattern that was ripped from its foundations, every stumble that led to knowledge, every sleepless night that culminated in a flash of understanding, every encounter with the painful truth - All of these things are single steps that added up to the climb.

The mountain metaphor has been serving me well in framing my own process of overcoming a couple years of anxiety and doubt and anger, a couple years in the shadows, in the valleys, in the lands lower than I knew. The only problem with the image of the mountain is that it peaks. I realize that there is no summit that we can hope to attain, only more inclines into thinner air.

On the solstice, I stumbled on my roommate and our friend performing a ritual, burning two candles for that transitional day. One candle burned for all they hoped to gain within themselves, and one burned for all they hoped to leave behind. They asked me if I’d like to join them, and I did.

A couple years ago I would have dismissed this invitation and left them to their own devices, but getting that deep into some canyon wilderness opens you up to all kinds of things as you try to locate your trailhead. I can see it simply as an exercise, and I can take from it what I need and filter what doesn’t connect.

We talked a lot about losing fear, or more, actions from fear, actions from loneliness, actions from unhealthy ambitions, greed, dependency, weakness, a need to control. We talked a lot about opening up to courage, to faith in ourselves, to action from love (in all of its complexity and misinterpretation), action of kindness: to ourselves and those around us, actions of knowledge and strength.

After the candles were lit, my friends were elated, they said that they felt like a weight had been lifted. I told them that I felt a burden. They tried to help, they asked me about it and I explained it with the mountain metaphor. I told them that I felt like I just arrived at a false-summit, that I suddenly caught my first glimpse of the next ascent, steeper than before, rising higher into the clouds. “The challenge of love?! the challenge of courage?! The sort of discipline that real kindness demands?! This is going to take everything I’ve got, and then some...”

My roommate told me to turn around. She said, “Take a minute, and look back down at how far you’ve come.”

* * *

Sometimes I feel like a pessimist, but outwardly, people often comment on my optimism. My good friend who passed through town on tour the other day asked how someone who tends to wear all black, has naturally black hair, can exude so much light. Damn, that meant a lot. Maybe I’ve been mourning something. Maybe I was born mourning something, but every moment gives you a choice between wallowing and hope. My whole life I’ve spent wishing, always longing for something, but I always believed I could get it, maybe even if I didn’t understand how. I used to want very material things. I wanted the spotlight, and power over people, despite my drive to understand things, to know people, to know the world, to be open, to talk. We’re conditioned to want all that empty stuff. I think deep down we feel that it will somehow break that vast separation between us, dissolve that universal loneliness, if only we get a little more - but it only pulls us further apart.

Now I just want to be calm. I want to not fly so high and drop so low on my ups and downs. I want to create, and have much less interest in reaping the spoils of my creations on any economic market, or up on some stage. I believe that we can be kind to each other, to understand our world and ourselves. I believe in patience and in process. I believe in the action of love, as complicated and difficult as loving can be - and I’m not talking about some mystical innate romanticized force of hollywood love. I believe that we can be friends, that we can let down our walls, be peaceful, be reasonable, resolve things. I believe we can find value in our passing moments and not in the hollow goals that pull us from them. I value beauty - real beauty - in nature, in art, in all our hearts, in the sunset that comes with each waning day. I believe in hard work towards genuine ends, that we can learn to share, that unjust power will always crumble, that we can never be perfect, but always be “perfecting.”

I don’t know what it says about our times to be called an optimist for spouting this stuff. These aren’t things that were meant to be strived for. These are things that we’re all entitled to. Why does our system shove them away? How far into the darkness are we when it seems like only the hopelessly hopeful, the deluded, the guru, the therapist, the rambling artist, can speak of any of this stuff genuinely and openly and not face a cold shoulder or a dismissive joke?

And then I start to wonder: in which direction are we heading from here?

Some Thoughts On My Approach

I’m learning to paint. It has been a long time coming, but somehow up until now I’ve spent little time with a brush in my hands. I’ve noticed that I think about a painting in a similar way to how I think about a recording - I approach the balance of colors and textures with a similar mindset. Recording is also feeling a lot like sculpture. This has made me reflect on the way I make music, on the way that I take abstract thoughts and feelings and moments and mold them into something tangible. It has made me think about why my music process differs from my process with visual art.

Learning how to paint is easier than learning other things because I’ve become more skilled now at learning new skills - and I’ve already put a short lifetime behind my approach to creative endeavors. That’s not to say that I can make the brush do everything I want it to do (hardly!). I just finally know how to be patient with myself, I know that with time and the right effort, it will get there. I know that when I start learning something it will seem simple and I’ll have some semi-conscious fantasy that I’ll be a natural, and know all the moves instinctually. I’ll want to do it my own way, but eventually I’ll make mistakes and learn why the masters of that skill share certain techniques in common. I’ll work to learn the rules, and then I’ll encourage myself to break them. I’ll find myself humbled by the infinite ways to approach the medium. And I’ll do whatever it is, a lot, and over the course of years find my place within it.

I’ve been painting as much as I can. I have a better handle on the brush, on the feel of paint, the way it mixes, and I’ve had multiple pieces to show to people further down the path than me, who can offer a few constructive words in response that break the task wide open for me again. The more you do it, the more confident you become. The more you respond to a piece in a way that only you could respond to it, the more that your pieces start to be recognizable as “yours.”

The way that the system supporting music has been set up really stunts the art-making potential of musicians. We aren’t often encouraged to treat ourselves as “artists,” as far as the process is concerned. The album cycle, the idea that you refine and record a dozen songs and then go on an insane journey to market that material greatly inhibits creative growth. Being signed with a major label allowed me to see the priorities of the system from within. It’s a business. They finance a product and use all the channels they have to sell as much of it as possible. Indie labels do this. Independent artists do this as well. It's standard twentieth century American procedure. The scary thing is that when I talk with musician friends, our conversations usually turn to matters of business, as that’s how we’ve come to gauge success. Things are of course changing as this system crumbles away, but I don’t want to expend my limited moments of life worrying about how much my music sells or who I get to open a show for or what some executive says they think.

As far as creating great artistic material is concerned, though, there are relatively few musicians that have been able to produce enough material to have their own voice start to shine through. Your starting point as a young artist is most always going to be the work of others that moves you or entertains you or challenges you, so it makes sense that so much of the new music we get pushed at us is a collage of references to other people’s works and style from the past.

As much of an adventure as I’ve had creating and releasing two full length albums, I feel that I have held myself back in a lot of ways. I’ve probably started more than a thousand songs in the last ten years, but seen only a couple dozen through to a polished, recorded, state. Recently, learning to record myself has been empowering. I now am less dependent on engineers and producers and studios and someone to finance those great costs. I also have a direct connection with the medium, when before, as a performer, I brought the concept and the paint, but someone else with a different skill set was doing the painting. As my own producer and engineer, I have control over the brush, and of so many new colors to mix in. I can paint on so many surfaces now. This has made songwriting and recording fresh and exciting again. There is so much new potential to aspire to, a new medium in which to find my voice, in which to make new shapes, to say the things I need to say.

A few months ago, when Lucinda Williams released a new album and I was blown away by the continued growth in her songwriting, even in her late fifties, I began to ask people why is it that most musicians do their most compelling work so young in life and sputter out instead of grow? Shouldn’t artists like her be the rule, not the exception?

This question obviously gave way to tons of other questions, and I had a lot of great discussions, but one answer that rang true to me is that musicians have the freedom and motivation as amateurs to create provocative work, but in entering their professional career, the call of the day often becomes entertainment and marketing - selling the product. As professional entertainers, the art becomes secondary (it feels pretentious to even be calling it art!), growth is stunted by tour schedules and the details of photo shoots and agents and managers. You are as a young artist, more often than not, critiqued on such abstract grounds as trends and fashion and who you associate with, that it is easy to become more insecure with success, to shoot towards the safe middle instead of finding your edge. If creative work was only a vehicle to enter into the spotlight, then once in the spotlight, different priorities might emerge in order to stay there. That is a totally separate issue.

I don’t want my creative process to suffer, to never develop to its full potential because I’m driving to the ends of the earth to market it. With Street To Nowhere we worked on our one album for three years, and toured on it and marketed it for almost two years. The experience was incredibly interesting, and I wouldn’t change it, but it still shocks me how much time was spent on eleven of my songs. I think of my favorite painters and how much work they produced. I can’t picture any of them going around the world for a couple years to promote their paintings, painting the same image again, night after night. They experimented freely, took risks, and just their finished pieces fill thick reference books. I’m becoming more interested in their approach, in those creative priorities. I’d rather share with you more songs, straight from my head and heart, even if that means they are less polished, even if some experiments yield freaks of nature. I’d like to expend my energy to further find my voice, and refine my skills, even if that means my work reaches less people. I don’t need to be Starbucks. I’m happy being a neighborhood coffee shop.

My Work Space

Trembling In A Room

You can't predict when it will happen again.

You step into a room and it grabs hold. Jostling you, one arm around your throat, the other taut around your chest. Your breath is inconsistent and your words tumble like rocks yanked loose from the mountainside. Unexpected, heavy, and conspicuous - crashing below. You want to let the force pull you into the shadows. You want to let it drag you back into your car, its hand guiding yours as you turn the key. You want the engine to rumble, to feel the car reverse down the street, flow silent and surging backwards into the river of headlights. You want to let it shove you back through your front door, slam you down hard on your bed.

It isn’t humility when you find yourself suddenly kneeling unintended at the presence of others. It isn’t the awe of staring upwards into the branches of a massive redwood or of being swept into the stratosphere by a string of music. The feeling is humiliation. It is a sudden thick shadow shooting out from you, saturating the world around you. You handed away your power, let your anxieties seduce you. How did it happen? You don't want this.

You simmer in this silent injustice and fury. In this quiet, uncontrollable, unintended, dehumanization.

Some will take advantage of it and perform their invisible rituals on you, manipulate you, exploit you, experiment with push and pull and gifts and insult. Some will try to save you to save themselves, to lift you, to frantically convince you of the virtue that you have inside - and some, will allow you to just exist as that whisper of a person, casting their gaze to the floor as you drift by.

There are others though, that will stick with you at a healthy distance, allow you to navigate your own ascent into understanding, to ride your own wave of strength and weakness, and expect you to soothe them when they fall. Because this shocked and shaken creature isn’t you. It happens. it’s a symptom of something that is in you, but you’re bigger than it is, and you’re losing it - you’re way too hard on yourself. There is no way you must act with these friends, these companions. The effect of the mixture was predetermined. It is chemistry. There is a way things will go because of the ingredients involved. You may react oddly when another element is thrown in, but some things are just more conducive to one-another than others.

So fuck it. Go out into the world and be the conflation of elements that you are, see how the world around you reacts, hold on when you feel something dragging you away, and look for an opportunity to grow and for those that will grow beside you. Be fascinated as one moment and one feeling slip into the next.

New Apartment Recording

Today I took a break from the obsessive process of recording my next album, and made a new APARTMENT RECORDING. The song is called "While Another Day Drew Near" - click to listen and download

Apartment Recordings are quick recordings of songs that I don't want to slip through the cracks. I track them in my bedroom and try to counterbalance my more detail-obsessive projects by doing only a few takes of everything, even if the songs themselves have been refined and edited for weeks or years, and releasing them that same day. I hope to catch the sound of my space and the character of my voice in a particular moment on a given day.

Each volume builds over time so come back in a little while and there will be more to hear.

Love

I would say that the thing to focus on is love, but that word has been dragged through so many shopping malls and abusive homes that I'm not certain it articulates my point. So instead I'll say, the thing to focus is on is how we treat one another and how we treat ourselves.

Emptied

Sometimes you share so much that you drain yourself. I feel that way after I sing. After I really sing. When my throat is all chopped up and things are hazy and sort of out of reception. I could just burrow somewhere and hibernate. When I really rear back and sing, when I’m not thinking about what I’m singing, how I’m singing, it’s redemption, it’s a gap in time, a space that couldn’t comprehend anxiety or fear. I could command a sudden army, or break a stable of horses. And after, there is this space where everything feels numb - the house is burned down - there isn’t hardly an everything to feel.

A lot of today was like that. Today I shared my history and walked through the halls of another’s. We saw other people’s lives pasted up on massive walls and deconstructed into flashes of paint, into torn-out images wrenchingly arranged. Days like that are fascinating and cathartic and you can feel your darkest chasms taking on light, but as I drove away my heart wanted to nod off like a little kid on in the back seat on the long ride home. My heart had partied too hard.

A lot of tonight was like that too. I was confronted with a taste of my own history, in the back of a tour van with an old friend in the driveway of a beaten down house with a party swarming around us. And we were playing songs, writing songs, and I was fucking wailing. This was like we used to do. He used to pick me up in his band’s van when we both had some new songs, and we’d idle on some deserted corner, or find a picnic table in an empty park, and with whispered restraint, share the best of what we’d been creating. We’d give each other notes. These were our own little songwriting workshops. I’d get his approval, which I’d learned to trust, and then I’d be ready to sing for the world.

Now I don’t have much restraint. People kept climbing into the van. They were there, and they weren’t. I can sing loud over anything, anywhere, and it no longer phases me. I’m stronger within myself. I have a better idea if something I’ve written is ready - there's no such thing as ready. I don’t need his approval as much, or I should say, I now value my own approval so much more.

You don’t need to turn the stereo on when you head home from a day like that. You’re a shell, or some discarded bones, a light on a distant radio tower flashing on and off against the horizon. All of the longing that goes into a day, all of the need to connect, and to give, and have your isolated existence be recognized and understood in that of another - all of that is washed away. There is nothing to be accomplished. It’s time to rest.