You're about to read something I have not spoken of to anyone in a very long time. In fact, it's safe to say none of you knew anything about this side of me because most of you "met" me well after I had already put an end to it. So, it never came up in those conversations where people asked me about my writing and nobody ever got the chance to read any of it.
That's right. It was written work. But not the kind you're used to seeing from me. These were songs.
I started writing them when I was thirteen and experiencing several different types of awakenings my peers had not. My growing disgust with them and with myself for being one of them and at society in general spawned some of the most glorious failures ever put to verse. I had neither the life experience nor the skillset to make most of them work, but the songs demanded to be written. And so I wrote them. I got better, too. Much better. By the time I was an adult, I'd written well over a hundred "albums'" worth of material, some of if pretty damn good, too.
My gaze directed ever inward, I wrote songs about unrequited love, (a huge theme in my shy days) songs about that never-ending feeling of unfulfillment that had dogged me since puberty, songs about relationships I'd not even experienced yet, and songs about human apathy and greed. I also experimented heavily with first person narrative in my songwriting, often presenting the singer as the subject of a song about someone truly reprehensible. For example, in a song I called "The Corporate Kingdom," the narrator unapologetically refrains, "I am just a man with ambition/On an economic mission" in a mock Country-Western warble. The subject isn't just greed; it's also the celebratory manner with which some people extoll the virtues of that greed and have no problem being all alone in the world.
Thanks to Talking Heads and XTC and later on King Missile and Cake, I was comfortable with satire and even self-parody, something that has informed my fiction and non-fiction writing for years now.
One of my favorites, "Echoes in the Dust," has lyrics my father could not comprehend. He grew more and more frustrated as he read the lines, "A fragile world of glass comes crashing down/And all the lies of love start flying around/He lied to her and she lied in return/Now there's nothing left, watch it all burn." I felt the meaning was clear as a newborn baby's phlegm, but my father just grunted. If only I had performed it for him.
That's where things get a little weird. Since I became a fan of music in the New Wave era, I was obsessed with lyrics. I wouldn't go as far as Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison and say music without words in meaningless, but I definitely feel music with words is much more meaningful. That's especially true if the words have a true meaning beyond, "My boyfriend is a prick" or "That bitch owe me money." I wanted to tell stories with my songs. And sometimes I wanted to vent all my impotent rage. These were lyrical snapshots of moments and moods I could revisit and reexperience whenever I felt the need or desire. But what about the music?
I never learned to play an instrument or how to write music. Every song I ever wrote resided in my head. There were moments where I thought about sitting down with a musician and working them out, but I never had the confidence to go through with it. Then life got in the way.
If you're wondering where all those hundreds of songs wound up, might I suggest you check the landfill? Yes, I destroyed them. All of them.
I won't go into great detail about that except to say that when you've had your heart ripped from your chest, squeezed in front of you until the blood is gone, and then thrust back in, the desire to write songs can be the greatest casualty. I never wrote another song.
Or did I?
A few weeks ago, something strange happened. That sound, that distant musical sound I hadn't heard in years, returned. I ignored it at first, figuring it was little more than an echo of a previous time, a part of me that no longer existed. But it persisted and soon I had song titles written down. Once again, that was where things seemed to end. I decided that was fine. But the music would not be denied.
I have now written five songs in a tiny notebook the size of the palm of my hand. I damn near cried when it started happening. I'd thought that part of me long dead, not simply asleep. I find myself unable to stop now. In fact, as I write this, the chorus to a song I called "Temporary" is incessantly playing itself over and over in my head.
These songs gaze inward in ways I was incapable of accomplishing in my younger years. My anger isn't gone, but it doesn't control the direction of the songs as much as it once did. There is a song about human apathy called "Big Release" but its tone is decidedly sympathetic to the idiots in the song. With lyrics such as, "Look to your right/What do you see?/The misinformed yearning to be free" it feels as if I have compassion for people I also find reprehensible. We are, after all, human beings desperately craving relevance.
Who knows what other songs I will write before I have what would be considered an album's worth of material? What I do know is I feel alive in ways I have not for years. Perhaps that is the greatest song o them all~
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