Today’s Thinks: Two weeks after vacation

Sometimes with both songwriting and emotional states, you just have to take the L.

The emotional context: I can’t shake the feeling that I’m due for a crisis. But maybe this is what it feels like to finally be “on the right path” and realize how much you have to lose… not to mention how much you’ve treated poorly and/or discarded. The gravity of it all.

Maybe that’s what I’m feeling right now. The magnitude of the things I have to lose in my life because right this second it is so darned good. A year ago I remember laying with D on the bed of Freedom of the Seas with tears in my eyes, about my greatest fear, that we will start to take each other for granted and lose sight of how special our partnership was and is. And that it will take something bad happening to him or me to snap us out of our blinders and re-feel the waves of our deep love for each other wash over us.

I don’t want that to have to happen for me to feel the gravity of my loved ones. That wave of love because someone has suffered a tragedy, that moment, the overwhelming wave of love and the shock of impending grief, is my greatest fear. So I’ve tried to 1. channel these thoughts into music, and 2. practice being present, letting my parents parent me, letting my brothers roast me, and letting D be a partner to me.

This is probably also a result of no longer having growing-up crutches: social alliances, the approval of people, especially in positions that could make things happen for me, having people “already know who I am” because of my band… Yuck. It’s also what happens when I’ve spent all January and February writing music every day and just finished writing an album at supersonic speed.

Here’s where the L comes in: I’ve realized, if I don’t capture an idea and complete a song before the feelings or visuals of a song dissipate, it’s game over for “finishing” it with the original motivation still intact. Writing a song takes me about 20 hours apiece. So I had a couple songs that I couldn’t finish and had to chop up before it felt complete, and even though I wrote other songs to make up the tentative length, it felt like the album is missing pieces that could’ve made it spectacular.

Sometimes when I get ideas from panic attacks, I spend some time letting the scenario play out (because I have no discipline) and spend an hour or so feeling nervous that I’m about to receive “the phone call” saying someone I love has died. It’s gonna happen any moment when I’m in this state. I feel it deep in my amygdala. That’s where I go digging for music.

Once I find the riff floating around in the manufactured grief (a few minutes of silence will do it), the music that comes from it is permanently attached to that visual, and it’s hard to not be attached to how I think the song should look. (and sound, but synesthesia makes music writing visual).

I spent so many hours the last four weeks rewriting and rearranging three songs to death because no other ideas felt “quite right” more than whatever sloppy placeholder melody I concocted initially. I rearrange and rewrote them until I didn’t like them any more.

A song I’ve been obsessed with that I wrote T-4 days before vacation had a distinct Part 1 and Part 2. The first half sounds like a home invasion, and the second felt like a funeral or some sort of sad resolution at the least. I absolutely nailed the first half and it’s my favorite song I’ve ever written. But, I didn’t like any of the 6 variations of Part 2s that came before I decided to end it after Part 1, and take the L for Part 2.

In fact, there are so many versions of songs + endings of the five songs that made the cut, that I could release three MORE albums just of 1 song + 5ish different endings apiece.

But as of 12:23 tonight, I am finally DONE writing Whimsicalities and the whole thing is in the capable hands of my mixing and mastering guy. And the best part is, the wave of panic and feeling overdue for crisis has dissipated through this writing. I’ll take that W.