Regarding songs I've written, there are portions of various pieces I admire. Usually, I resist having complete ownership of what I've written, mostly because if it feels really good I figure I am an instrument and am just channeling it from some other source. And if its bad I try to tell myself the same thing.
In the layout of my creative year, January and February have traditionally been my recital writing period. This is the time of year my friend, Mark Robinette, will send a list of songs that need to be written for the Clytie Adams School of Dance. We've done this for a couple decades now. Mark will assemble a list of pieces, many of which are already composed, and half of which will be played by live orchestra for the dancers. This particular school, mostly comprised of ballet dancers, is unique among schools in that their dancers perform to live music.It is quite costly for the leaders to continue with this decision, but they feel strongly about giving their students the full dance experience, with fully produced recitals at the Browning Center at Weber State University. We play live in a small ensemble, followed by a live 80 piece symphonic orchestra for four full performances and two full dress rehearsals before thousands in audiences. It's one of my favorite gigs.
In early January Mark and Kelly DeHaan and I will take the list of dances that need new music and divvy them out among us. I usually write 6 to 8 new songs each year. I'll get the basic info that includes the type of dance (ballet or jazz or modern), the age of the dancers, time signature and BPM (how many beats per minute) and the length of the piece. Some dances become fully developed songs, which are usually about 3 minutes long. Some are snippets, a minute and a half, and others are somewhere in between. This year the songs are based on a myth, which is also a classical ballet that involves water and sea nymphs and sunflowers. For the last two months there has been a layer of music floating under everything I do. It goes this way every time I am working on a song. Frankly, it can drive me bonkers! I can't get the dang tunes out of my head. They swirl there like undertows that no-one sees from the surface. Sometimes I'll just stop what I'm doing and go get my guitar just to give it voice so it might leave me alone. I wonder sometimes if part of me is afraid I'll lose the tune so it keeps repeating, repeating, repeating in my head. Anyway, it's a thing for songwriters. At least for this one. We have a love/hate relationship with our work.
Some things take an awful lot of ruminating before they are complete. If my thoughts always had voice I would probably be embarrassed how much I replay the tunes I'm writing in my head. Like this quote from Einstein, I will repeat a line 99 times, and its not till the 100th time that I realize something needs to change.
For instance, when I was writing the song Get Back On That Pony I had originally written this lyric:
Seven years old on a gray Palomino
I sat up tall with my face to the wind
On around the 99th time I repeated that song in my head I had this thought; "Maybe you should look up the meaning of Palomino."
Turns out a Palomino is a yellow horse.
Since gray is one syllable and yellow is two, which matters in lyric writing, I changed that gray horse into a gold Palomino.
When Chris LeDoux called me to say he'd like to record the song, he said it was particularly meaningful to him because as a boy he had a yellow pony he used to ride through the hills of Wyoming.
Thank goodness I allowed myself to churn that piece in my head as I was creating/channeling it. I would have lost all credibility if I had trusted my initial instincts.
Not only am I reminded, in this quote from Einstein, that not every idea is worth completion, I am also given permission to ponder, ponder, ponder before I settle on any finite conclusions. In that regard, if life were a song, it would probably never be finished.
