At the risk of making a horribly generalized statement—and doing so with my tongue sort of in cheek, but not entirely—I think this music thing comes down to people who make shit up and people who don’t. Songs, that is.  Songwriting, I suppose we can say. But I’m even leery of using that description. The term ”songwriter” evokes the picture of the navel-gazing folkie or a person who is something of a life journalist—reflecting the world we live in (our own personal one or society at large) on an aural canvas for others to hear and understand. And, yes, I like that stuff and I’m definitely in that camp.  But what I’m talking about is not exclusive only to deeply introspective people and musical poets. 

After all, when you think of the long-haired, heavy metal guitar player who maybe is not at all a “sensitive type”  but likes to come up with ear-splitting licks and crunchy stomping riffs for the vocalist in his band to sing over, that hardly sounds like the kind of thing that you immediately associate with “songwriter.” (“Songwriter” sounds a bit elitist, doesn’t it?  And folks are more likely to picture visions of James Taylor, perhaps, before they think of Kerry King from Slayer or something.)  But my point is, those kinds of guys and gals also fit in my definition: people who are drawn to creating stuff. Original musicians of all kinds, indeed.

When my cronies and I were 16 and learning to play, the purpose of doing that was that we wanted to be in a band… and that by definition to us meant a group that had songs. Their own songs. Stuff they made up. We had no interest in becoming guitar players so we could join a wedding band, you know?  We didn’t want to be a tribute band—and, in fact, I’m not even sure we knew what that was back then. Cover bands? We didn’t get it at all.

I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but my first club show ever was a 45 minute set which was 5 covers and 5 originals, and it was only 5 covers because we had an average age of about 17, had been playing for maybe a year at most, and simply hadn’t written more than 5 songs we considered worthwhile in our short little musical lives. It was a bit of a necessary evil for us because we needed to fill out the set.

Now, that was then, this is now… I’ve become more understanding of the idea that covers are their own thing, but that’s where I come from and that’s still my musical DNA to this day.

For simplicity’s sake for the rest of this entry, I’m going to call everyone who falls in the category of being the kind who “make shit up” a “writer.”

It’s been said that writers—of any kind, whether it be songs, prose, poetry, etc.—write because they have to. I believe it. The evidence for me is that, despite that I get hung up on labels and things that make me feel like I’m being pretentious and self-important, I never stop writing stuff. I don’t know if folks who aren’t writers know that about the ones that are. It’s not like I have 5 or 6 songs I have poked around with.  I’ve got 35 years of stuff of all sorts…

What kind of sorts? Full songs, incomplete songs. Ones I’m proud of, and ones I think of as throwaways, despite that they are not without their charms. Lyric scraps that never landed anywhere. Songs that were done in bands, and ones that never were.  Songs that were intended for public consumption, and ones that were cathartic and not intended for anyone to hear. Ones that were done as an exercise in trying out a particular style, and ones that are more in line with what I intrinsically do. And lots and lots of napkin recordings.

“Napkin what?” 

Napkin recordings. That’s what I call rough demos. I came up with that term because I’m always telling people, “This recording is the audio equivalent of sketching an idea on a napkin while discussing it at a coffee shop.” Proper recording is a big undertaking, and when you’re writing songs, you need to be able to have a down and dirty record of it, for any number of reasons, including:

• Fleshing out your ideas.
• Remembering your ideas when they’re new. (That’s a big one.)
• Demonstrating your ideas to other musicians so they can learn them.
• Sending the work in for copyright registration. (They call it “submitting a deposit.” I don’t exactly know why.)

Tonight, sadly sequestered from the musical world due to COVID-19, I spent a lot of time going through the oodles of little demos on my hard drive here.  It’s not a complete list of titles, but what is there spans many, many years. 

Some of the recordings are more polished than others. They range from recordings of me simply turning on a phone (or cassette if it’s that old) and singing live with a guitar on my knee, right up to multi-track recordings that I attempted to record well . And every thing in between.  Some are collaborative pieces. One could make a good box set of lo-fi recordings if one felt so inclined, and, frankly, I think this is probably true for anyone else who lives in this world. We’ve all got literal and figurative closets filled with old tapes, four-track masters, mp3s, band rehearsal casettes (if we’re old enough)… 

What really is striking, though, to me, is how there’s a historical timeline in all this. When I was a kid, I remember reading a book that talked about some guy who had the world’s record for the longest beard and it mentioned how you could see the aging process in the whiskers by the changing colors every foot or so as he increasingly got whiter. There is a historical track in reviewing this old stuff, too.

You know how artists—national artists—always want to play their new songs and the fans just want to hear the old stuff? Well… I don’t have anyone who wants to hear any of my stuff that badly because I’m a local musician and not famous, but in my own world, it follows this same sort of thing: I have certain old songs that I don’t really think about much any more or have much desire to play them—even though I like them and despite that they were tremendously important to me at one point—simply because they’ve been done. I’m onto newer, more recent things. But it’s amazing to hear them and remember what I was going through and where they came from. One song, for example, in particular was the result of me being really emotionally fucked up over some stuff in my life when I was in my 20s. It made me sad to re-visit that, even though I haven’t thought about the song in decades and I’m long removed from the situation.

And it’s not just the source of the songs or what they’re about. It’s everything about a time and place. One of the songs I revisited became a regular for years in one of my bands, but in the napkin demo, you can hear my little baby’s swing cranking back and forth throughout the recording, as well as me talking to him before and after the vocals start.  I was on Dad duties while I was fleshing out the ideas. He’s in high school now.

Time flows and time flies.  But each step of the way, writers leave journals. Some do it on purpose; I do it inadvertently. Musical journals are what happen while you’re busy making music.  Making shit up.