Seeing as I can only seem to talk around the topic of sex…I’m back talking about song-writing.
I woke up at 6:00 this morning, which gave me a good hour and a half to work on music before getting ready for my other work. Similar to what I do most mornings. Lately my schedule has been out of whack, because I just got back from a 3-week road trip with my family. (Which, by the way, was three weeks away from my precious guitar)
But I was happy to be at my desk with my guitar in hand. Unfortunately, nothing happened. I wasn’t able to come up with anything new; and I couldn’t make any progress whatsoever on the songs that are in process. Nothing. Everything I played sounded like crap. But I plugged away at it for an hour or so, then gave up.
I have days like this from time to time. Hell, it can be every day for a week. But if I come to the table day after day, then eventually something comes. Woody Allen said that showing up was 90% of life. And Arlo Guthrie described song-writing as “song catching”. You had to be ready, with a pencil and a guitar, when they floated by overhead, otherwise they passed by and never came back. That’s why you have to show up, and don’t give up.
The other thing I’m thinking about is, and I’m not sure who said it, “you have to write through the shit”. This is certainly true for me. And I imagine it’s true of Bob Dylan as well. More than half of what flows through my pen is (not pen-is, Mr. Freud) absolute dreck. Sometimes I think it’s lovely–until I read it the next day. I’ve been know to put in upward of 10 hours on a poem or song before realizing what absolute pollution it is. Time wasted? No! Because afterwards I might come up with something beautiful. I couldn’t get from point A to point B without first wading through the sea of effluvia. (How many more synonyms of ‘shit’ can I come up with?)
Which is why it’s important for a writer, or any artist, I imagine, to set time aside to write every day. And why they should persevere even if the best they can do is doo doo.