Fragments Lost, and Found Again

I’ve been on a songwriting kick. (Yay! Dry spell over!)

I’ve written two songs in as many weeks, and am working on two more. So the fields have done the fallow thing, and they’re over it. Let’s grow something!

One of the things I frequently do to encourage inspiration to flow is to go through the flash drive in my handheld digital recorder to see if I have captured any fragments that are ripe for the picking. You never know when that cool lick you spontaneously started playing and promptly got busy and forgot about will actually turn into something.

Interestingly, it happened in reverse for me this time. Sort of. I was driving, and started spontaneously singing lyrics – they even rhymed – so I grabbed my phone and recorded the melody and a few little instrumental embellishments to express groove and feel, and then forced my brain to recall the words that I had sung before, and sung them over and over until I got to someplace where I could write them down. It worked. I remembered enough to have 75% of a song written before I even picked up a guitar.

Got the song done that night, because it basically wrote itself, and recorded a scratch track so I would not would not would not forget it. Always record a scratch track! Then I thought, dang, I really should go through this recorder and archive all these songs and bits of songs into my songwriting folder so I can actually find stuff to work on, and that’s when I discovered that I had written a song fragment a few months back that was the perfect ending to the song I had just written. Same key, same basic chords, same feel, but with appropriate variations in the melody and phrasing. And it ties up the song with a big shiny ribbon and makes the message even more powerful. I thought, “Holy shit, this is time travel!” I barely remember writing that fragment, barely remember. But there it was, ready and waiting–and clearly telepathing that I should go through my flash drive so it would be found.

That, right there, is why I will be a songwriter until I keel over dead at a ripe old age. 

There are more magical moments per capita among creatives than any other bunch of the population. When we are in flow, we inhabit a field that is populated by Muses and Causers of Coincidence and Guardians of Synchronicity. Stuff like that up there happens. And it feels huge when it does. Songwriting seems to be the biggest catalyst for me, though not the only one. I have actually written songs that have come “true” long after I wrote them. (Be careful how you “spell” your songs; they might come true.)

I’m currently doing research on a song I was going to call Lament for the Bees, but . . . Boy, that does not seem like a good idea, given the revelations of the previous paragraph, so maybe I will call it the Rebirth of the Bees instead. Or maybe Requiem and Rebirth? Well, I’ll have to play with that idea a bit. (Sorry, thinking out-loud, bad habit.)

[Totally irrelevant little sidetrack: I actually dreamed last night that I had an apiary in my backyard, and somebody was sneaking in the night to vandalize it and kill the bees. In my dream I woke up, went out on the upstairs deck and saw them coming, and leaped down from the deck and across the creek to tackle this rather large dude to the ground. Then I held his arm twisted behind his back while I pressed my knee into his lumbar region and hissed in his ear, “You look like a boy who likes to eat, just nod. Well, as much fun as it may sound to live on bacon and beer, I have bad news for you. You can’t. And you have to have bees to have almost all of the other stuff. You don’t want to mess with my bees, or any bees, because that would make me very cranky. Consider this an unfriendly warning. Now get up, and run as fast and as far away from here as you can, and don’t ever come back.”]

Back to the main topic, finding inspiration through circuitous and coincidental serendipities.

• Carry a notebook or a sketch pad around so you can capture those lightning blasts of instant inspiration. I have a mini notebook in my purse, and a bigger journal in my car, always.  And there’s a journal in the living room, and one by my bed, and even one here in the office, in addition to the journal I write in every morning.
• Keep your voice recorder icon in an easy to access spot on your phone so you can grab it and record without wrecking the car. Remember the days when you used to have to call yourself from a damn pay phone to leave a song on your answering machine? Good times, good times.
• Keep your tools handy and close, and when you travel, find a way to take some small pack-able tools with you. When you’re traveling in unfamiliar territory, you’ll see stuff that will spark something, and one thing better be able to lead to another or you are missing a very important call from the Muse.
• Use your tools, and take good care of them. Perform regular maintenance. Get things cleaned, repair the little things, keep them in good condition, so it’s a joy and a pleasure to Practice Your Craft. Take it seriously. Run it like a business. Schedule it, and make it inviolable. To quote some sportzketball type organization, just do it. It makes you ridiculously happy, right? So do it. Often.

And watch the inspiration come flooding in. And if it doesn’t, keep doing it anyway. It will. There’s really nothing like changing up your routine, making something other than mundane normality a priority. It gets magical fast, and you just have to hang on and ride it, because if you shut out the Muses too many times they will straight up shut you out back. And you don’t want that to happen.

Most of all, enjoy the process madly and embrace the madness wholeheartedly. There’s nothing else like it.

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