words

I was having dinner with my friends Abby who teaches english at BGSU and is a poet by nature. I was talking about my desire to start a band and that my strengths are more instrumental than vocal. I can write good riffs, chord changes, rhythms, and music, but am not so good at singing and writing lyrics and melodies.

Her advice was to jump in and write about things not relating to me. I am very self-conscious about my singing and especially the lyrics I write. They are not good and they are too personal. So maybe by extracting me out of the equation I can write more freely. This is true of all art. If you want to learn how to do any type of art, check yourself at the door and jump in. If you are self-conscious about your art it will suffer. That's why art is so humbling and difficult and why most people are turned off to it in the first place. Art is never perfect the first time you do it. It takes time to learn the craft of your own process. This is what I am digging into with my songwriting. I wrote a song last summer and ended up making it too complicated and thus never really finished it. I am writing the words separate from the song to see how that works. I wrote my first poem/lyrics about Steptoe Butte, my favorite place in the whole world. I like the first draft of it, I just went for it in the first stanza and replicated the same word structure in later stanzas and wrote a chorus. I have a song in mind for it that I will explore tomorrow morning.

Josh (Kalichman, my best friend and violin player) and Jeff (Peplinski, a fellow composer and bass player) are coming over tomorrow to jam with me. Maybe by the time they get here I'll have a good idea of this song they can further develop with me. Above all else I want to just play freely with some other Christians to praise Jesus and make our art for His glory.