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Read the Goober Diary Archives
October 26, 2006:
A Perfect Song
I am reading a book by Julie Powell called Julie & Julia, in which the heroine attempts to cook her way through all of the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. She calls it "the Project," and I am still in the middle of the book, so I don't yet know whether she will meet her deadline. The book is mostly non-fiction, based on the blog she kept for the year of the Project. In addition to inspiring me to get back into cooking (it's been ages since I tried a new recipe), the book has gotten me thinking about my own life's Project. Julie refers to MtAoFC; well, my Project is MtAotPS, Mastering the Art of the Perfect Song. This Project has been going on much longer than one year; it's been going on for most of my life, actually. It started when I was 13 and learned that songs that popped into my head could be worked on, edited, refined, and that even the hopelessly self-indulgent ones could be mined for ore to be used in future songwriting endeavors.
This year, I am on a break from songwriting. I have been calling myself "doing nothing" and "being a total slacker," but that is not entirely true. What I am doing is re-learning how to listen. Just as even a very good cook can challenge and thrill herself by mastering a new style of cooking, a songwriter can empty herself of all ambition and start over from scratch with the simplest of questions: what makes a perfect song? That's always been the question, from the very beginning, that has driven my songwriting. I'm not unlike the kid who breaks every toy he gets for Christmas because he just has to see how it works. There are so many good songs in the world that it is impossible to ever hear them all. There are so many good songs, in fact, that it actually becomes kind of tedious to listen to them. I tell you this as a survivor of many, many open mic nights populated mostly with competent writers performing good songs. It's almost easier to write a good song than it is to write a bad song; a bad song has to stand out enough from other songs to be categorized as "bad." Much more plentiful than bad songs in this world are good songs that all kind of sound the same.
More rare than good songs, but still pretty common, are great songs. Great songs are the ones you turn up when they come on the radio, the ones that make it onto those compilation CD sets that get sold on late night TV, and the ones that everyone has heard at some point in his or her life. Great songs are often songs you think you haven't heard, until you finally find out the title of that song you've been hearing your whole life and realize it's the same one everyone's been talking about. Great songs are not always radio hits, but they do tend to be the ones that artists have to play at every show they do. Most artists, if they stick around long enough, can come up with a great song or two during the course their careers. A great song has that killer hook, whether it be a catchy sing-along chorus or an indelible guitar riff or an irresistable drum beat. It has something that makes it better than good. It has something that makes it memorable and that sets it apart from other songs in the same genre or by the same artist. The reason those of us
who are hardcore music fans keep seeking out obscure indie artists is not just because we are snobs who think we are too good for the radio fare of the common man (though, yeah, a lot of us think that). It's because so many great songs aren't on the radio, and so, if we don't dig,
we might miss something that will change our lives for the better. It is surprising just how many truly great songs are hiding in plain sight in the racks
of CD's at your favorite music store that have never made it onto a Billboard chart or even into a "staff picks" newsletter. Most
people can live with that; I cannot. In fact, I have developed a disturbing iTunes habit, due in large part to the fact
that discovering new music at 99 cents a pop is insanely satisfying, and I always know that, for every song I
discover, there are millions more songs that I haven't discovered yet! To be honest, it's becoming a problem.
But I'm straying away from my subject, which is Perfect Songs. These are the songs
that transcend even greatness, the ones you've internalized by repeated listening so that you can hear them any time you want
without even turning on your stereo. They're the ones that are so perfect, they feel like songs you wrote yourself. They also
sound like something completely new, like a song you've really never heard before. These songs are few and far between, and - here's the rub -
what makes a song perfect is a subjective matter. A song that burrows its way into my heart can be almost anything: an old folk ballad,
a punk rock song, a pop hit on the radio, or a snippet of opera. Perfect songs have surprisingly little in common with each other.
Perfect songs make songwriters believe in magic.
I still haven't written a perfect song. I may even have
really given up on it this time; I can't tell for sure. Part of me wants to keep chasing after it, that elusive holy grail, but
another part of me just wants to relax and find my way to the songs that are already out there and let them inspire me, not
to write my own songs, necessarily, but to really love music again. I can't help analyzing what makes a song good; I've
done it for so long that I've almost forgotten how to listen to music any other way. However, I am no longer
immediately rushing to my guitar to try and match it or top it or prove that I can do it, too. I started writing songs
because I really love songs. It sounds so simple when I put it that way, doesn't it? I'm not sure when it became this thing
that I had to prove to myself, and to the world, a way to stake my claim to something extraordinary, something
other people couldn't do. I always told myself it wasn't competitive, but, honestly, how could it not have been? Isn't that what
"proving yourself" is all about? So, for now, I'm just listening. Tapping my foot, nodding along, getting up
and dancing if the mood strikes me. Admiring the melody without wishing I could write one as good. Singing along
without thinking about whether my voice is good and, if so, how good. Perhaps I will move on to writing
a song without imagining the audience and what they'll think when they hear it. I don't know. I'm trying not to be
in a hurry. Feeding myself music more obsessively than I've done at any point since college feels really good right now.
In Julie and Julia, the writer compares cooking to sex.
She talks about the way making mistakes only adds to the messy pleasure of the whole enterprise and the way watching her
husband enjoy something she's cooked herself seems to feed that same kind of primordial urge. I think she's got something there.
Having learned to cook relatively late in my life, I have been surprised by how much I've enjoyed it. I've been surprised to learn
that it's not an exact science, that you start to learn what tastes good together without having to consult a book, and
that even the worst cooking disaster can be laughed off and thrown away with a shrug of the shoulders. When I was younger and people
would ask me why I didn't want to learn to cook (I was seriously almost phobic about it), I would tell them that I loved food too much
to want to understand it. If I learned to cook, I said, the mystery that was part of the pleasure of food for me
would be ruined, and I would never again be able to enjoy eating in the same way. I wanted to continue to be amazed.
Now I know what makes a good meal good, and it hasn't
diminished my pleasure at all. It's just made me feel powerful, something I didn't expect to get out of an activity
that has been so often maligned as "woman's work." Even when dinner is something plain or simple or not as good as I thought it would be,
I can still look at it and think, "I made that with my own two hands." I don't know what makes a perfect song perfect, but you know what?
I'll bet it's something just as simple as the right combination of the right ingredients, with just a dash of
spur-of-the-moment inspiration thrown in. I've been overthinking the whole thing, taking something that's as natural
as hunger and putting it on a pedestal of mystery and magic when all I needed to do was just dig around in the pantry
and make something - anything - out of whatever ingredients I had on hand. What's worse, I took something that's natural, beautiful,
and a light to the whole world, and made it about me. I took something as important as food or sex and shrank it to the size
of my ego. I don't even know how it happened; it was such a gradual process. One minute, I was thinking about music; the next
minute, I was thinking about how to get people to listen to me play. I'm not going to be too hard on myself, here,
because it's no walk in the park to be an independent, completely unfinanced and doing everything herself musician,
and I had to take care of the business side. I'm proud of the progress I made, too. I have no regrets. It's just
that I can't write anymore, and I don't want to play shows if all I'm doing is playing dress-up with a guitar in my hands.
I'm just going to listen to my iPod on the train on my way to work and feed the food of life to my
hungry, hungry soul.
What’s
in my stereo at home:
What’s
in my car:
What's
playing at work:
What
I'm reading:
- Julie and Julia by Julie Powell
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