This morning I sat down at my writing table with a notebook and my ukulele and a cup of coffee, and began strumming and humming a tune I’ve been working at for about a week now. I had the idea not long ago of taking mandolin chord shapes and playing them on the ukulele (which is tuned very differently from the mandolin) in order to hear what kind of strange and complex harmonies and dissonances might result, and from those experiments I derived at least one very interesting chord sequence. (My listening, of late, to Eddie Vedder’s ukulele album has been very inspiring too.) A day or two later, sitting on a public staircase in an out-of-the-way corner of Bernal Heights, I developed a melody for it, which means I have now arrived at my old creative wall: writing the damn words.

After twenty minutes of making no headway (not enough effort, of course, but by now I’m very frustrated with the difficulty I have matching words to melody) I decided to Google “songwriting creative process” and see how other artists approach the different components of songwriting. And that search immediately reminded me of a great blog that the New York Times published back in 2008 and 2009, “Measure for Measure,” about the songwriting process.

Andrew Bird was one of the contributors — at the time he was working on Noble Beast — and he wrote these words in his first post from 2008, which I found very encouraging:

I’ve got 11 songs mostly written and several dozen distinct melodies. I never worry about the melodies drying up. Since I can remember, I’ve had melodies in my head. I chew my food to them.

Almost every breath contains some fragments of an escaping melody. If I shape my lips so as to whistle, my breath will take on a musical shape like sonic vapor. Words are much trickier. I would forgo words altogether if I didn’t love singing them so much. My choice of words and my voice betray so much and that’s what’s so terrifying and attractive about it.

And a little bit later he writes something I can relate to equally well:

I’m kind of the opposite of the confessional singer-songwriter who fills notebooks full of poetry and intones them over a bed of chords. Meaning or “the truth that’s in my heart” usually reveals itself well after the record is released. I’m often surprised that the things I care about actually end up in my songs. Until then I’m mostly concerned with shape, tone and texture. I’m really an instrumentalist who sings words and if you care to pay attention you might enjoy them.

The very interesting thing to me is the way Bird gets started writing the lyrics to “Oh No,” which is the subject of his post: on an airplane ride somewhere he got stuck behind a child who just wants to get off the plane, and something about the kid’s wail reminds him of the hitherto un-worded tune. When he sits down to put some words to the tune, he imagines himself in the child’s place, and begins accessing his own memories and dreams from when he was that age. And from there, the associative process takes over, and before long he has a workable draft.

All this very closely reflects my own experience with the process, so this is perhaps the best way for me to open it up in the future. Like Bird, I’m basically an instrumentalist. For me, coming up with interesting and satisfying chord progressions and melodies is extremely easy — put a stringed instrument in my hands, or seat me in front of a piano, and within about 10 minutes I’ll be playing something coherent that I’ve never played before. It’s not always all that interesting, but if it is any good I will clean up the rough edges a bit and make an immediate field recording so I don’t forget the basic idea. Melodies come after the harmonies, always — never on their own without any bidding; it’s as if I need the harmonic & rhythmic framework to anchor my melodic imagination.

But the words are an intense struggle every time, which is kind of ironic for a guy who calls himself a writer too. Since I began this project almost a year ago, I’ve completed or mostly written ten songs. Every one of them is fully formed in the sense that I have a chord sequence and melody that is set, but only four of them have finished lyrics (including the two that I have posted videos of here). Some are more successful than others, but in each of those four cases, I began with a certain scenario in mind, a picture from my life or imagination that the song kind of reminded me of, for no obvious reason, and I just started writing from there. A draft or three later, I had taken out the too-obvious or too-explanatory lines, and had come up with something mostly satisfactory, though it usually had changed quite a bit in the writing.

For example, for some reason the simple piano chords for the song I would call “Under Different Skies,” caused this picture in my head of someone being left behind on a train platform, as seen from the train pulling away. Sort of a clichéd cinematic moment, sure, but it was dreamlike in that I was certain about various aspects of the story behind the image even though there was nothing in the image to suggest any of what I knew. It seemed like a remembered image. It seemed like the last time this person was seen by the viewer. It seemed like an affair that had ended right there, perhaps abruptly. And it also seemed, paradoxically, that the person on the platform was the one who had broken away from the affair, not the person in motion on the train.

And so I started trying out words around this theme, trying to evoke this elusive mysterious picture, and after many false starts and several drafts, eventually arrived at the following lyrics:

I’m at the familiar station
Where I bring all my questions
Like so many bags to be lost

Answers here are questions there,
That’s what I believe
But I hope somewhere you’ve found what you need.

Which, if I do say so myself, seems pretty okay even though I’m not terribly content with certain lines. And I have to admit, that my favorite line, “where the stars are changed,” came directly from thinking about Werner Herzog’s famous rant in Burden of Dreams, where he complains that “even the stars in the sky here are a mess” — in that moment Herzog had lost all his bearings in the universe, and it seemed to me that not recognizing the stars was a good shorthand for not knowing where you are anymore.

Well now I’ve spent half the morning writing a small essay instead of the lyrics for my latest ukulele tune, but at least I now have a plan as to how to proceed — be open to random images taking hold of my imagination, and keep walking around the city with my ukulele and a sketchbook. If I’m looking, maybe I’ll start matching the right images to the right tunes with a bit more regularity.

“Not to recognize, every moment, some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of their ways, is, in life’s short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.” – Walter Pater

“You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.” — Jonathan Franzen

“I have been sitting at this desk for hours, staring into the darkened shelves of books. I love their presence, the way they honor the wood they rest upon.” — Richard Brautigan, The Abortion

“I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.” — Geoff Dyer, from Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

For the past six weeks, I have been busking (playing music in the street for the entertainment of passers-by) as often as I can manage it on Valencia and in the 24th Street BART station — sometimes nearly daily. I’ve always wanted to do this, but for various reasons I never did. However I’ve discovered that I love doing it, and it’s fascinating enough that I want to write about my day-to-day experiences in a series of blog posts.

What got me started was a simple conversation with a fellow musician. I took Dave Rosenfeld’s Klezmer Ensemble class at Zambaleta this past season, in order to meet some like-minded musicians, and not long after that I was hanging out with one of them, and we got to talking about busking. I confessed that I’d never done it, and she said “never?” and looked at me with such incredulity, you’d think I had told her I’d never worn a T-shirt, or kissed a girl. Obviously busking was one thing that I really ought to have done by now.

But there was a minor problem. I’ve only recently (that is, within the past three years) taken up music again. While I have historically never had problems performing or playing music for people, when I was a teenager I had a lot of fears and performance-related issues to sort out and get over. Unfortunately, in all the years I never played anything for anybody, those problems returned, and I needed to work them out anew.

My principle fear was that my music would annoy people, that it would be unwelcome. It’s an irrational insecurity borne of some very bad experiences centered around my piano practice when I was a teenager, and borne of some more recent interpersonal conflict that my practicing habits have given rise to. So I started small, testing the waters a little at a time. I had been posting videos to this site and to Facebook, getting nice encouraging comments, and so I felt ready to go out and try to face the world.

The first time was pretty nervewracking. I remember pacing around my studio thinking “okay, today is the day, today is the day,” and procrastinating endlessly. Then, finally, I packed up my fiddle and got on my bike and rode about three blocks. I set up in front of the Levi print shop, near 17th, and took a look around: would the people having an early dinner on the patio at Frjtz be annoyed? Was someone in the building going to hate this? Was I going to play badly?

I quietly tuned up and played a few notes, just open strings, then a G arpeggio, then some fiddling around the third-finger A on the E string — the little gestures and testing moves I make at the start of almost every session, to get oriented, make sure the instrument is in tune, and to find the tone I want, to get into the groove.

And then when I was a little warmed up, I decided to play as if nobody were walking by. Well, not exactly: I wanted to play well, because people were listening, so I decided to regard my little street session as what I call a “trial performance” — a dress rehearsal really, where you privately play through a set list as though you were performing it for listeners. So I dove into it; half an hour of Jewish music, half an hour of Irish music, trying not to notice that people were walking by, trying to avoid eye contact. And I got through it just fine.

Nor did anybody ask me to leave — far from. Just as I was wrapping up the Irish set, with a rendition of “Wheels of the World” that I’ve been working on for a long while, a construction worker emerged from the Levi’s print shop behind me, went to his car, and on his way back into the building thanked me for the music with a big smile and placed a crumpled bill in my case. I thanked him, finished up the tune, and inspected his donation.

It turned out that the first money I ever made for performing on the street was a tightly-wadded-up $2 bill. It seemed like a good omen, and since then I’ve kept it in my case for good luck.

Thus:

Songwriting has been a significant creative challenge for me, particularly the lyrics. Chord progressions and melodies have always been fairly effortless for me, but the words are a whole other challenge — it reminds me a lot of the first time I tried (and failed) to write a novel. I’m throwing away a lot of stuff. Anyway, with these I think the first tune needs a fuller arrangement with instrumental parts but is otherwise done, whereas the second needs at least one more set of verses.

By the way, the third tune is not mine. It is “Wild Goose Chase,” written by Elephant Micah, and I’m performing the version created by Dark Dark Dark. That’s the band that, I think, rekindled my interest in music, and in songwriting and singing. I haven’t done either since I was a teenager, so I have a lot of catching up to do.

Not much to say, just wanted to point a link there because this month’s showcase is exceptionally spectacular — it features some wonderful shots of bridges, tunnels, factories, and other forms of infrastructure.

Lately I’ve been reading the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, in the Margaret Jull Costa translation that Serpent’s Tail just put out. I’ll be writing about the book more in the future, I imagine, but in the meantime check out this amazing quote that I just found, copied into my journal from the beginning of this month:

Now, as many times before, I am troubled by my own experience of my feelings, of my anguish simply to be feeling something, my disquiet simply at being here, my nostalgia for something never known, the setting of the sun on all emotions, this fading, in my external consciousness of myself, from yellow into grey sadness.

Who will save me from existence? It isn’t death I want, or life: it’s the other thing that shines at the bottom of all longing like a possible diamond in a cave one cannot reach. It’s the whole weight and pain of this real and impossible universe, of this sky, of this standard borne by some unknown army, of these colours that grow pale in the fictitious air, out of which there emerges in still, electric whiteness the imaginary crescent of the moon, silhouetted by distance and indifference.

It’s the other thing that shines at the bottom of all longing like a possible diamond in a cave one cannot reach. Never seen it put better than that.

Also I just noticed this Believer article on Pessoa by Benjamin Kunkel, from 2003. I will be reading it soon…

Cineaste Magazine has published a long, considered review of the new documentary by Stephen Soderbergh about Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine. The film consists entirely of footage of Gray himself, either performing his monologues or being interviewed. The reviewer, David Sterrit, takes a positive view of the film overall, describing it at one point as “spellbinding,” but he complains that it gives an incoherent picture of Gray’s professional development; he goes on to conclude that the film

thoughtfully raises an array of issues related to performance, theater, film, and language, and they would be all the more fascinating if Soderbergh went into them a bit more attentively. Then again, I might be ascribing too much seriousness to a documentary intended simply as a tribute to an admired colleague and companion. Viewing the picture from that angle, I salute Soderbergh for making an engaging, absorbing portrait that will spread the word about Gray’s unique achievements far beyond the following he built when he was alive. Beyond the personal interest this holds for me (Spalding was a friend for many years), keeping Gray’s name and accomplishments alive is vital at a time when artistic innovators start fading from public consciousness the moment they leave the media spotlight behind.

What Sterritt says rings true, although I should confess that I haven’t watched the whole film — I hosted a preview screening at my house with a small group of friends, and we found it so overwhelmingly intense that night, emotionally speaking, that we had to stop playback and choose a different film. We were each already feeling vulnerable for different personal reasons, and Gray, whose face was often nearly life-size on the screen, seemed to be with us right there in the small living room, absorbing us into his own maelstrom of obsessions and pushing us just a bit too forcefully, right then, into our own dark places. Reportedly Soderbergh, who for a time was close to Gray, felt the need to withdraw from the friendship out of fear that his own life and work would be completely overwhelmed by Gray’s personal intensity. In that case, the fact that we couldn’t actually finish watching it that particular night is actually a ringing tribute to how well Soderbergh has conveyed Gray’s personal and performative power. I am looking forward to watching the whole thing soon.