Hiding behind a turtle

I was with some friends last weekend and they told me the story of their turtle. Apparently the turtle decided at some point that it wanted to leave the relative safety of the pond in the backyard and seek his fortunes in the ravines and bushes of Stony Hill. On recognizing his absence, my friends presumed that was the end of his story, but one day several months later they spotted him making his way across the back lawn towards the pond, ladened I’m sure with stories that he’d never be able to tell them. And this is me coming back to blogging hiding behind the turtle.

I think I needed some story to sneak in behind and this one appeases me even though it’s not my own. I’ve been battling failure in my mind. It’s very hard for me to blog when I feel like there’s nothing to report. There are no headlines… weeks upon weeks of footnotes and sidebars but no headlines. I have had some important conversations, had some great song ideas, spent some useful time shaping work-in-progress but there’s no trophy to show from any of it.

And I’ve been fighting with myself. Fighting the fact that so much of me seems to be satisfied day to day without this project happening. Several years ago I thought that I was a writer because I was a writer. I thought it had to happen and what I needed to learn to do was to facilitate it better. I no longer think so. I think the writer can get buried under the rest of life – the phone calls to and meetings with clients, the washing of dishes, the comfort of computer games, the work targets that seem to get up earlier than me and go to bed after me to the effect that I can never quite reach them, the weeks which seems to race to their end once Wednesday morning arrives, the tiredness and the tedium and the search for meaning and understanding in it all.

When I’m in contact with good art a part of me wakes up and itches… I feel my own desparation to create… all the songs singing inside that are scraping to get out. But when I get absorbed again into the everyday, that part of me is stifled and grows weaker.

The interesting thing is that I started paper playing because I felt like God was saying “Go!”, so the days on which I just don’t feel like it speak with less authority than before. It still so hard to get going and keep going though.

Admittedly, the “lack” is discouraging. I have no access to my recordings on minidisk – my player was stolen some time ago. I can’t access soft copies of songs that I wrote over the last couple years – my laptop isn’t behaving. Add to these things the general lack of working equipment for recording ideas or trying out licks on electric guitar, and the absolute lack of money to fund recording and it all feels like now is not the right time. We don’t watch the sky to make our plans though. We know that the moment God is ready, clouds appear and we suddenly the rain is more than we can manage.

What I need to do is to learn how to be a writer in the middle of everything else – the phone calls to and meetings with clients, the washing of dishes, the comfort of computer games, the work targets that seem to get up earlier than me and go to bed after me to the effect that I can never quite reach them, the weeks which seems to race to their end once Wednesday morning arrives, the tiredness and the tedium and the search for meaning and understanding in it all. And the truth is, “everything else” is the soil from which good songs grow.

“I keep some lyrics alive, like a pilot light,
Hoping that one day it will ignite,
And burst into flame and fire…”

Several things… or maybe just one.

I haven’t blogged in several days because I imagined it would feel like work. Ahhh… the strength of my aversion to work. I also made the excuse that I needed to sort my thoughts out so I could write about one thing and not the many threads that I’ve been weaving and chasing over the last few days. Too late for that now – I’ve started writing.

I felt very discouraged about paper playing several days ago. I took out my electric guitar (I play a Hamer Duotone) and plugged it into my amp to work on some music ideas for a new song. I haven’t sketched on electric in a long time. I often can’t bother with the setup time and I don’t want to have good ideas waiting on me while I untangle cables and power cords. What was frustrating was not being able to get the sounds I wanted. My amp (it’s a Laney GC50A acoustic/electric combo) is in desperate need of repairs so the electric channel is next to useless right now. So I was trying to work with the acoustic channel, which really doesn’t give any help to guitar effects – everything sounds a bit dry and muted. I even tried to work with headphones, just plugging straight into the output of my effects pedals (I’m working with Visual Sound stuff – a Route 66 and an H20) but the levels were impossibly low. In the end I couldn’t really test my concept. I couldn’t really hear how good or not good it sounded.

When I add equipment shortcomings to the thought of the scale of what I’m attempting it’s very discouraging. I feel like not bothering. I guess there will be days like that though so I need to try to remember why I decided to do this in the first place.

I didn’t get much paper playing related stuff done this past week. Work has been demanding and I haven’t yet figured out how it make the most of the several hours that I’m not working. I much prefer having long blocks of time to having 1 hour between activities. I think now is when I’ll have to learn how to grab the moments though. Work isn’t going away or promising to get any easier anytime soon.

I did have a good writing session yesterday morning (Emancipation day). I was able to lay out ideas for this new song and explore the perimeter of the concept. Interestingly enough I didn’t write many lyrics – as in lines that I expect to keep for the song – but I generated a lot of good ideas and images… at least they seemed good at the time. We’ll see when I look back at them later. It felt relaxed, which I think I needed. I tend to pressure myself to come out with more tangible acheivements – a verse (our at least most of one), a chorus – just something that I can say is done or 1 or 2 lines away from being done. It was nice to explore without putting that pressure on the process.

So I push on. I’m harbouring dreams of meeting with some musicians on Wednesday (Independence Day) to sell the vision for the project and to play a couple of songs. If I’m doing that I need to organize it today.

“Starting from zero got nothing to lose…” Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”

Why this blog?

I’ve been threatening the world that I’ll start a blog for some time now… in my mind (Cue diabolical laughter)!!! That is, the threats have only been issued in my mind… not that the blog would be in my mind… erm… maybe I should start this post over. Oh whatever!

I figure if I’m going to give paper playing a go for the next few months, it would be worthwhile to blog about it. Most people who aren’t involved in the process of creating art, view art mostly as a finished product. Some get a look behind the curtain, whether it be a band rehearsal or a visual artist’s studio. I think it could prove useful (and hopefully interesting to someone other than me) to journal about and during the process.

Whenever I’m interested in an artist I’m curious about how they do what they do. I want to know what went on, how they came up with that concept – it’s hard to explain how much really great concepts piss me off and inspire me at the same time, how they crafted that verse, how they play that riff. The curiousity is stronger when it comes to music because it’s the art form I use, but it happens with poetry, prose, film, painting, etc. I guess art does that. This blog is my opportunity to record the “behind the scenes” without it being doctored, cleaned up or decorated.

I’m guessing it might help me as an artist if I journal my own process; to see where I started, where it took me and what it ended up being. I’m convinced art has a life of it’s own and it leads you just as much as (or more than) you lead it… but let me abandon that train of thought before I start sounding spooky or mystical. Too late?

It also would help me to see myself through the lens of paper playing. I think I’m finally not afraid to see myself and to capture a snapshot of a “now”. I’ve always disliked journaling because when a “now” becomes a “then”, the raw realness of who I was is very uncomfortable and sometimes just ugly. My memory has a wonderful way of self-sanitizing. There are benefits to forgetting as much as I do but I’m sure they’re drawbacks too.

This blog will serve as a history. It may only be a history of an attempt but God-willing, it will be history of a successful project and the story behind an album. And if God is willing, it will be the story of a miracle; maybe a small and specific miracle but a miracle none-the-less, because when I look at what I’m attempting and the comprehensive lack of resources I have to pour into it I’m sure miracles will be required.

So, that’s the “why”.

“… It will not be perfect, but it might be good…”

A final beginning?

It feels like this could be my last attempt; my last go at being an artiste in this sort of way. I realize I could be wrong. It could be that I’m just reading the signs and believing the odds. I might be thinking this way because of a sense of how things traditionally play out. With Zachary’s arrival (again, do I know or am I going with my gut?) drawing closer I’m anticipating the kind of change that will remain for many years. I don’t know what the future will look like. I don’t know what God will engineer. My life so far has been a story of Him doing things that haven’t been likely so it wouldn’t surprise me too much if He continued to defy the standard expectations.

What I do know is that (almost all of a sudden) I feel the energy rising to give this another go. Not however, the slow, careful, methodical building that I would have tried 10 years ago. I feel like I could sprint for a bit. I think it’s time to do as much as I can, as fast as I can and as well as I can.  And there’s something very liberating about how I see it working. I’m not trying to build a band, with the right blend of personalities and the type of synergy and shared vision that would keep us together during trying times. I’m throwing something together – with attention to detail, love and expertise of course – and I want to see how far it will fly. I’m not hoping it will last. In fact I’m expecting that it won’t. I just want to see what it can do right now.

It’s actually wonderful to contemplate investing in something where won’t have to focus a lot of my energy on the vehicle (i.e. the band) because I’m not trying to build a vehicle that I plan to drive around in for the next many years. It’s more of a push cart or soapbox car than a proper vehicle. It’s meant to be disposable. If, for some reason, it lasts longer than I expect it to, we’ll figure out how to cross that bridge. The best part is that I, and really everyone involved, can focus our energy on the process and the product and that becomes the common object of interest. In other words people can commit to this thing not some much because they could see themselves working with each other for a long time, but because they want to work on this thing.

For the part of those who would participate in this project, I don’t think that they need to feel like this is who they are or are becoming artistically. This is who I am right now. Even for me that will change over the next few months to years. It’s like taking a picture. It will show what you looked like at that point in time and may foreshadow what you’re becoming, but it won’t represent you and in fact will represent you less and less well as time passes.

And it needs a name. I have “paper playing” in mind. It’s going to be interesting to see how people react to the name. I didn’t conceive it as any deep and meaningful metaphor. I actually though of “paper plane” first and then though it would be nice to play with word sounds by replacing “plane” with “playing” (at the risk or nobody being able to find the website), with the wonderful coincidence of introducing some musicality to the name. And that’s really hope it will be – songs that I sketch out, we assemble and we throw out there and see how far they fly. Songs unburdened by dreams and expectations and carried by our joy in seeing them go anywhere at all. And when we throw one out and watch it for a bit, we build another and see what it does.

We can’t wait ‘till the wind is right…