In previous posts I've mentioned my West Coast Mother of Mercy, who has been patiently helping me to turn my rambling prose into somewhat readable chapters so I might have a shot at selling my second novel. The mentor in question is one Heather King, sibling of Queers frontman Joe King, and the author of a just-published memoir called Parched, about her years as a barely-functional alcoholic.
Ms. King is perhaps best known for her pieces for NPR's All Things Considered (a couple of years ago she did a segment on going to see the Queers play in L.A.), though she's written essays for a variety of magazines as well, primarily ruminations on spirituality and L.A., which sounds absolutely horrible until you remember that she's a New Hampshire girl at heart; her writing is marked by a bleak New England pragmatism and the fine black humor common to those of us who have spent years braving the hellish winters east of the Mississippi, whether we still live out here or not.
It's this dark and unpretentious humor, along with Heather's charming self-deprecation, that keep Parched from descending into melodrama. Recovering alcoholics have a way of walking around with their sordid pasts pinned to their chests like medals of honor; Heather wears her past like a self-inflicted scar, refusing to shy away from the pain, degradation and embarrassment of life as a falling-down drunk just as she refuses to romanticize that life. Nor does she self-righteously condemn the horrors of addiction from a safe and sober distance, as is so common in these types of stories. Addiction is complicated; an honest story about addiction can't, by definition, seek to shock or preach. Heather doesn't sidestep the temptation to moralize as much as she walks right over it, sneering both at the idea of alcoholic drinking as entailing anything remotely romantic, as well as the notion of puking up cautionary homilies against alcoholism. "It's just so fucking stupid," I can almost hear her say in her thick New England accent.
Heather's writing is outstanding. Parched is incredibly tight; not a word is wasted, and the prose flows effortlessly. Like a great rock and roll song, it is structurally sound, it gives the illusion of simplicity in spite of its depth, and it embodies a passion for speaking to the human condition. True, Heather's my pal, but Parched is still the best book on addiction I've ever read.
Buy it at Amazon.
Or at Barnes & Noble.
I promised to post about the bridge in the new song but I couldn't figure out a way to do it without going on for about eight pages so it's on hold for now.
This week I'm mostly going to be stuck dealing with boring business stuff and taking care of a few things around the homestead. I'm taking Wednesday to go over tunes with J. Choi, who is just back from tour. And if I'm lucky I might find time to work on that second chapter, though the arrival of a weekend houseguest on Friday would seem to make that possibility a bit more remote. I'm a week away from the end of the month, which was when I had hoped to have three chapters completed, and a proposal to go along with them. It's now looking less likely that I'll be done by then, but at least I'm more than halfway there, which is better progress than I would've bet on this time last month.
I have no idea when the band will be back in the saddle. Schedule conflicts and financial hassles have slowed that horse down for the time being, but it's at least giving me time to work more on the older songs and write and perfect the new ones. Always looking for the silver lining, I am.
Well, well, well, it looks like I've been a bit lax in updating you on my day to day creative life, but that's mostly because I've been swamped with boring and tedious work, leaving little time for creative pursuits.
Even if I had time, things have slowed considerably on the writing front. My second chapter appears from all angles to suck tremendously and it happens to suck in such a way that I don't know how to fix it other than to start it over again, which is too depressing to consider just at the moment. I've sent it to my mentor - who I briefly mentioned in another post and who I will discuss further in the next couple of weeks - in hopes that she might suggest some fixes that will help me avoid having to start from scratch. Until then, I'm staying in a holding pattern; the last thing I want to do is start a third chapter that has to be rewritten to accomodate a restructured second chapter. Which is probably just an excuse not to work, but what the hell, it's a Sunday and a couple of samurai films I rented from Netflix are calling my name.
On the songwriting front, I came up with another new one that seems to be pretty great. The tune has been running through my head for a week and a half or so, mostly in a positive fashion. The lyrics still need work, but the verse, chorus, lead and outro are all dandy. Unfortunately, the bridge kind of sucked. Actually, it really sucked. Still riding the creative high that first took hold last October, I muscled my way into a new bridge yesterday that does justice to the rest of the song. I don't recommend this course of action to beginning songwriters, as forcing the issue tends to lead to poor results, but when all the cylinders are hitting, it's sometimes worth it to just sit down and start banging away on the guitar to see what happens.
I want to try to explain what this bridge does and how it does it. I don't know if I have the vocabulary, but perhaps by pointing to examples of other types of bridges I've written, I can explain it. That will take another post, so please join me above.
Yesterday, British M.P. George Galloway was over from the wrong side of the pond to testify before a Senate sub-committee on the Oil-for-Food program. Yeah, that George Galloway, the blustery, "r"-rolling friend to fascists who once told his pal Saddam Hussein that he saluted his courage, his indefatigability, the part in his hair and the down-home goodness of his light, buttery muffins.
The senators were typically clueless, allowing Galloway to take control of the proceedings in order to strut, preen and pirouette around like a demented peacock. When the sanctimonious Scot wasn't wagging his finger at the Bush administration, he was playing the role of drama queen to the hilt. "I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil trader," the victim of modern day McCarthyism intones solemnly. "You have nothing on me, Senator," proclaims the Michael Corleone of the new millenium. I had to remind myself that Galloway was indeed testifying in Washington and not auditioning for a role in a 1930s Warner Bros. gangster film.
The video will automatically download from this link. Galloway's testimony starts at around 1:51:00.
(link via Harry's Place).
One of the difficult things about writing is trying to keep from being discouraged by the man-hours-to-production ratio which is, at least for me, disappointingly low. Although putting together material for a full-length record takes a lot of time, most of that can be attributed to the collaborative process; actually writing, re-writing, editing and arranging the songs might not be a lightning-fast process, but neither does it move at a snail's pace.
That said, having worked through the weekend with one day off for a prior commitment, I'm up to about 20 single-spaced pages and still going strong, which is much better than I would've predicted. I'm getting back into the writing mindset, which means learning to accept and even rejoice in the fact that one measly page represents much rolling up of the shirtsleeves, battening down of the hatches, and cracking of the whip. Spending all day doing creative work that doesn't really come easy has an effect not unlike that of a real job; at the end of the day, you're so mentally exhausted that you just want to crack a couple of Miller's and take in the ballgame on ESPN before heading off to bed. It's not always such a bad feeling.
But there's no time for atta-boy's; I've only barely started to chip away. So after a quick run in the rain it's back to the salt mines for your working boy. I'll try to report back later in the week.
Okay friends and neighbors, your humble narrator actually buckled down and got some difficult work done today. Really. After the workout and the laundry and everything else, I managed to put the old nose to the grindstone and churn out a full chapter (7 pages single spaced in Word). Now maybe that doesn't seem like a big deal to you, but let me tell you that "writing" writing (as opposed to "songwriting" writing) is almost physically painful for me, and it's seldom that I sit down to it willingly (with the exception of these missives, of course). But the need to pay the bills and put food on the table is an amazing motivator, comrades, so your intrepid narrator put the pedal to the metal and made it happen.
My first and best editor is my lovely bride Pixie, who encourages me in all the right ways, without forgetting to tell me where I've gone wrong. She performed such a service this afternoon and the result is a pretty dandy first chapter about which I felt good enough to send off to my muse/Mother of Mercy (more about her in future posts). You know that old jazz thing about not just playing the right notes, but knowing which ones NOT to play? Well, your working boy Lance is jamming with Coltrane and Davis tonight, and if it's unseemly to mention it, you might consider that years of abject failure in attempting to tell this particular story have created a scenario in which the tiniest modicum of progress is greeted with joyous Alleluias all around. The clouds part for the radiant sun, the heavenly horns bleat blissfully, the angels' voices fill the hearts of men with unspeakable joy, etc. Creativity is 99% failure and 1% success, so to those who would condemn my public display of self-affection for my admittedly minor accomplishment, I say go suck an egg.
I'm not entirely happy that I have to fulfill a long-standing commitment over the weekend that will preclude any more work tomorrow, and that the arrival of a houseguest tomorrow evening will only complicate matters, but I still feel that the bull has been grabbed by the horns and the horses have left the gate, so starting Monday morning, I expect to be back in the saddle. Whether it shall be as the rider or the ridden is anybody's guess...
Yesterday called for an earlier wake-up than usual as I was asked to come in for a Q&A at a class at Walter Payton high school. Once a year teacher Doug O'Roark offers a seminar course in which he discusses, as far as I can tell, the history of punk (where the heck were these classes when I was {enrolled} in high school?). Among the required reading are a few selections from Punk Is A Four-Letter Word.
It may not surprise you to learn that I was late, but I kind of figured that the kids would've been pretty disappointed to see a musician actually showing up on time, so no big deal.
Most of the kids asked good questions and had obviously read the stuff and paid attention to what we were discussing. It was a bit bizarre to me, naturally, seeing as how I had attended high school so infrequently in my youth, and was virtually never prepared in class, much less interested. So it warmed my heart a little bit to witness obviously bored, sullen looks on some of the faces, and the occasional whispering and jabbing.
As Pixie had travelled with me to ensure I didn't get lost (I'm sorry to say that anything south of North Ave. might as well be downtown Bangkok to me) I treated her to lunch at the honestly named Thai Restaurant on Madison in Forest Park - one of the only Thai restaurants in the area I haven't tried out. The Pad Thai was a little greasy, but the red curry with chicken was outstanding, and the fried tofu was the best I'd had in a long time. I don't intend to digress into a restaurant review, because if I did, I'd be telling you about the pricey-and-worth-every-penny New Rebozo on Madison, and Khyber Pass on Lake - one of the finest Indian restuarants I've ever tried - and Grape Leaves on Oak Park, and New Pot on Lake, etc. The truth is, we can afford to eat out so rarely that when we do I like to pretend (to myself of course) that I'm a food critic for the Trib and that it's my sworn duty to be tough but fair as I hurl the bombastic kudos and stinging barbs with seeming abandon (again, only in my head).
I'd like to say that a few more paragraphs on the book were completed but they weren't. I did, however, stare intently at the first page of the first chapter for 3 or 4 minutes. But there was a cold Miller High Life with my name on it so I poured a glass and settled down to fool around with my new songs for a couple of hours. The songs are, for all intents and purposes, done, but these ones both have variations on the vocal lines near the end (I always seem to write in pairs) that are designed to sound spontaneous and emotion-y (which they kind of were {spontaneous, I mean} and are {emotion-y, that is}) so I've been trying to perfect what comes where while making it all sound completely natural.
My own home-made chili (I give it 4 forks!) made an early evening appearance as I cooked up a batch and brought it to my sweetheart at work so we could have dinner together on her break. By the time I got home and washed the dishes it was time to knock off for the day.
I've been roped into a late afternoon babysitting gig and a large pile of laundry beckons so I won't be able to get out to write today. Let's see if I can resist the allure of checking my e-mail fifty times or so, and Googling silly stuff in the name of research and fact-checking, and actually get some writing done.
I got some writing done today but I kept coming back to those two tunes from yesterday. Tweaking the lyrics is an ongoing process but I think I've finally finished - or at least come close. If your main concern is whether to use the word "fantastic" or "magnificent" in the second line of your third verse, you're in pretty good shape, I think.
As noted in previous posts, I'm trying to be more disciplined and focused in my songwriting and to that end, I've tried to write almost exclusively from titles of late. But sometimes you come up with a song on the spur of the moment that doesn't fit with any of the titles on your list, so you make do. The one that was half-written already that I finally more or less finished yesterday has gone through three titles, but I think the third one will stick, and it happens to be one that's actually been on my list for some time: "Alexia."
Go ahead, look it up.
You can see that what it sounds like and what it means are two very different things, and ever since I ran across the word I've thought it would make a great title for a song about a girl, but the right girl song never materialized. A few months ago I ran across yet another sign of the apocalypse - a website that picks amazingly obtuse comments out of baby name discussion boards for the purposes of pointing and laughing at the insane names with which people burden their children, along with their deranged justifications for naming their kids things like Callahan and Skyler and Lawnmower Jr. And, naturally, a couple of the rocket scientists over there had decided that Alexia was a lovely name for their soon-to-be-ridiculed unborn daughters.
Since the new song is about confusion and abuse of power in love, I couldn't think of a better title than a name that represents confusion and abuse of power in parenting. This might be what they mean when they say "this stuff writes itself."
I figured I'd better blog about this now because I have some appointments in the a.m. tomorrow and Thursday so I might be AWOL until the weekend.
After posting yesterday's entry it occurred to me that my predicament might've raised an obvious question: Why don't I simply spend part of the day working on songs and another part of the day writing? There are two reasons:
1. When I focus intensely on creative work, I get exhausted pretty quickly and I find it extremely difficult to switch gears and still do anything worthwhile.
2. It usually takes more time than I planned on.
For instance, after returning from my errands yesterday at around 12:30, I replaced a missing string on my guitar, tuned up, and proceeded to finish a song that had been sitting around unfinished for 4-5 weeks. That was going to be it for songwriting, but then I started noodling around on the guitar in hopes of finding a tune for a title I've been lugging around for months. Said tune materialized and writing, arranging, editing, rewriting and finishing it up kept me busy until about 6:30, at which point I had to head out to pick up Pixie from work. Throughout the course of the evening I kept rewriting lines for both songs and sneaking off to the office to jot them down, but for the most part I stayed away from work after I'd knocked off for the day.
For about the first 7-8 years of my freedom from the world of employment, I worked incessantly. I worked all day, part of the night and on weekends. These were the days before everyone had e-mail so I spent an ungodly amount of time on the phone at all hours. I was at various times working on songs for records, setting up tours, writing and publishing a fanzine, arguing with record labels over advances, running my own record label, etc. etc. etc. I finally and not surprisingly burned out. I decided that I'd no longer work in the evening or on weekends. The immediate effect of this was that I wasn't able to be as prolific as I had been, but this didn't necessarily seem like a bad thing to me; most of my work up to that point had been produced on laughable budgets under outrageous time constraints, and I helped matters along by going about my business as if my hair were on fire. I lived in a perpetual state of bewildered apprehension, convinced that any day the royalty checks would stop coming and I'd be back on the loading dock or manning the leafblower at 5 a.m. in the movie theater, or sitting behind the cash register at the Mini Mart. The prospect of a real job struck such terror into my heart that I worked twice as hard as I would've ever had to at a real job, and while most of my work was still pretty good, I was pretty miserable doing it. Finally calming down and getting onto a reasonable schedule may have caused a slowdown in production, but it started paying a few more dividends in the quality department and, at the very least, I was able to start really enjoying it again.
These days, I try to limit myself to a 7 hour day just so my work never feels too much like a real job. And though I didn't do so yesterday, I usually count domestic chores as part of that time. And every once in a while I take a half day off to read a book or watch a ballgame or something.
I'm glad I worked on the songs yesterday as they both came out very well and I'm creeping a little bit closer to that 14 song mark. I'm telling you, coming up with 14 killer songs is not an easy task. I never knowingly wrote filler before, but I have always suffered from a tendency to convince myself that songs that I really like that aren't working will somehow end up working in the context of an album. Which never happens, by the way. After 19 years of doing this, I'm finally forcing myself to dump dozens of ideas and completed songs that I really love and that I really do think are great songs, just because they're not great enough and/or they don't work in the context of this particular band. The result is a very strong group of songs that gets stronger with each new one. I couldn't be happier, but working this way takes a different kind of toll on you. It's a healthy kind of exhaustion, joyful even, but it's still exhaustion, and since it involves stuff that is ultimately all about just playing, it can be hard to give yourself a break. But I will. Once I reach 14 songs, I plan on taking a few days off just to pat myself on the back and tell myself how wonderful I am.
Okay, sportsfans, after rising at 7 for a work out, shave and shower, and having eaten breakfast and settled in with the first cup of tea, the $64,000 question is how do I start the week - by working on something with the potential to make me money (writing) or something with more potential to lose money (songwriting). Which doesn't seem like much of a choice unless you understand that songwriting is about a thousand times easier and more enjoyable for me.
There's plenty to keep me busy songwriting-wise and since I have May off from rehearsal, it only makes sense to finish up, demo the rest of the tunes, and send 'em off to the other guys so that we're all ready to work in June. Then again, I need to write three chapters and a proposal so my poor agent can try to sell my book; it's been my intention for weeks to spend this month centering each day around at least two solid hours in front of the computer screen. Forcing myself to sit and look at the screen is the only way I'll actually do the work, I'm afraid. Making things up and writing them down is harder work than you might think.
In any case, I have to head out in a few minutes to run a few errands so I don't have to make up my mind right away. I'm going to leave this one as a two-parter, friends, so feel free to guess and wager amongst yourselves until I return with the thrilling conclusion of this cliffhanger.