Songwriting

ellis paul has a website (ellispaul.com) with a function "raidio free ellis" - just a constant stream of music (his own). he's a great songwriter and has been around for a long while. this is a picture of him that i found on flickr. (btw, so easy to upload pics to this site. cool.)

songwriting. i'm always getting back around to it. seasons of lift "off the ground"; seasons (like now) of drudgery and feeling too busy. but i've always lived by a little mantra : just keep investing. it's not the song itself. it's the collection. it's what the collection does to you. who you become because of it, through it, despite it. the larger themes that only a broad span of work can show.

writing a song comes quite natural to me and, being a bit of a work-aholic and perfectionist, it can feel like i'm not putting in the effort that i should. i put plenty of effort in a lot of the songs i've written. i guess it's just different effort than the effort i expend at "work". with writing, you can be forever kicking something around in your head; singing in the shower. trying new lines, new verses, a whole new thought for a bridge. only to decide to keep what you had before. familiar themes. familiar vocal stylings. sting (of the band . . . sting (weird) - formerly of the best band ever; the Police [can you believe their reuniting!?) - anyway, sting said in some video i saw that he doesn't like to play the same song the same way twice. 'has a real value in trying to continue to shape and keep it creative. i took hold of this thought many years ago. for better or for worse. but it gave me a love for interpretation, spontaneity, and the "live" performance. there are pluses and minuses of every approach. if you're hold to "change" and you insist on spontaneous and inventive over a long period of time, then possibly "change" is same o'' thing you've always known. i love johnny cash for the very opposite reason; because with his themes, some things just never change. and i like it that way. but something else calls in me. and for this reason, on the 18th day, God created jazz. to me, the value is in taking something old and making it new, in this moment. a perpetual sense of taking what was and what could be and making it new, right now. i love that too.

i feel like i belong with songwriting more than i belong to anything else in this world. well, maybe a close second to just sitting and sharing thoughts with a friend or two. that's good stuff too.

j.