Get Pissed Off About the Right Things

I spent years creating music out of pain. Real pain. Intense frustration. Deep sadness.

And then … my life changed and the reason for all that was (ahem) divorced from my world and suddenly, I had room to be pissed off about other things. Climate change. Social justice. Sexual equality. Bodily autonomy. Much more productive things to be pissed about.

And my songs actually got better.

Writing from pain is therapeutic, and I don’t regret writing any of those songs (though I seriously regret recording about half of them). A therapist once told me that finding themes that are universal and familiar is a great way to get people locked in on your music, because they hear it and can say, “Oh, I’m not alone, this artist has been there and gets what I feel.” And that’s valuable, for sure. People need to hear songs that help them understand they’re not alone.

But.

A lot of songwriters kind of get stuck there. It’s low-hanging fruit, and it’s super easy to write a powerful, emotion-drenched unrequited love song; hell, they practically write themselves. It’s even fairly easy to write a fully requited love song, though with our limited vocabulary around the idea of love they all end up starting to sound a little samey. (I keep thinking, damn we need more words for love. We sorely do.) Please just don’t get me started on break up songs, though. Uffda.

Songwriter Katy Perry recently said in an interview that she had discovered the same thing, that being in a supportive and happy situation personally had led her to completely shift her writing focus away from writing about her pain – and that she was very pleased with the result.

She’s got room to be pissed off about the right things now.

And it doesn’t take long to find something to be pissed about when you look around you. Woody Guthrie would have an epic case of writer’s cramp just writing about the son of Mean Old Man Fred Trump who was such a terrible landlord and racist ass back in Woody’s time. So little ever changes. Mean Old Man Trump 2 did not fall far from the tree.

But we don’t have to just write a bunch of angry protest songs to create happily. We can write songs about unity and hope, we can write good songs about people coming together and learning something beautiful from each other (check out Dar Williams’ “The Christians and the Pagans”). We can tell the stories that will help us shape the world we want to live in. Science Fiction songwriting is a thing, y’all. We need more of the whimsical, hopeful kind.

I don’t want to create an angry world – we already have one of those – but sometimes you have to point out injustice to make people look at it. Angry protest songs are an essential ingredient, because they are all about our free speech and our right to protest. If we can’t protest, we can’t create the necessary momentum for change. In many states, protesting is now a crime, which goes against the very soul and center of democracy. So expressive folks and creatives have got to step up the rhetoric.

Woody Guthrie wrote many of his songs from reading the newspaper and rearranging a few words to make things fit into rhyming lines. He was a damn fine reporter, and his fire and passion fueled a generation of movers and shakers. I’d be hard pressed to think of a serious modern songwriter that wasn’t influenced by Woody. And rightly so.

Change requires some friction, a little turmoil. You have to stir the cauldron to churn up enough juice to put the fizz in the spell. A rainbow shows up after a storm has passed. Don’t be afraid to write the difficult poem, paint the shocking image, sing the angry song, tell the story about injustice – and then flip them over and sing the words of hope.