Old Offer - Week 18

I really struggled getting a song out the gate this week. Sometimes it's just hard, between busyness, ambivalence, and white noise on the creative line. This week I faced all three, plus grappling with indecision about which song to record, a process which often feels like choosing the best bad option.
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I forced myself to do some recording Saturday afternoon, but it was really slow-going and low-yield work. I kept second-guessing my song choice, started and stopped with various options, hemmed and hawed. Finally I just felt trapped and desperate, well aware that I also had no video and that the sky was very blue and the sun was out in all its glory. So I stepped away from the microphone and went for a drive.

As I pulled out of my driveway, my rationale was that I was looking for something worth videoing, some footage to use that might help me decide which song I could record. But here's the real truth: I went on that drive hoping it would inspire a completely new song.
Songs are small, and once they're finished, whether they're your own or someone else's, they feel light and easy. Good songs are good partially because they feel so simple and self-evident, as if they had been there all along. It never fails to mesmerize me, that a great song can be written in a sitting, after dinner and before folding the laundry. It really can and does happen like that. Songs are small, and that's why they can be so confounding when they don't feel right or aren't coming together or seem to be eluding you completely. The desire to force them into place or will them into reality can be strong. Unfortunately it usually ends up being a big candle snuffer on the whole creative process. 

So I went out for a drive, hoping that it would deliver me to or from something. Hoping that something new would occur, that I would find something I needed out there. A spontaneous spark. A little ordinary magic, if you will (wink, nudge). I knew I was pulling a play straight from the childhood game book-- avoiding the school project with the looming deadline by deluding myself into thinking that I'll just start it over, right after this quick break. 

Nothing extraordinary happened on the drive. No new masterpiece song was laying on the side of the highway. A couple herons flew overhead. I saw some baby sheep and goats, and the usual share of silos and meadows and country homes of all persuasions. I sped along roads I knew and didn't know, mostly avoiding the inevitable drive back home, the inevitable return to the work at hand. 
I ended up taking a video of the little rhubarb stand near Treman State Park. I've always thought this stand is adorable, but it is particularly cute when there is actually rhubarb to be bought. Then I came home. I put my headphones back on. I didn't write a new song, or start from scratch on a different one. I used takes I already had, and it all felt much less desperate than it had an hour before. Maybe it was the drive that eased my anxiety. Maybe it was the simple fact that a song needed to be completed by end of day, and this was the one in progress. Who knows. But everything came together and I felt much more at ease. I probably needed that drive, just not for the reason I thought I did. 
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I wrote the song last fall in the middle of the night. Sometimes I do that when I can't get to sleep. I've never really played it out much-- maybe it's time to change that.

Executive Patrons:
Karen Schantz and Alan Bargar

Lyrics:
Late night, long drive, after dinner coffee
Full moon in spotlight, inevitable memory
and oh nobody knows
Twisting the fader, scrambling for a reprieve
just fire and brimstone and top forty country
and oh nobody knows


But I've been wondering if I took you up on that old offer
would you have really let me stay and could I have stayed my hands


Girl at the rest stop tying up a shoelace
and back in the car trunk, revolver in the suitcase
and oh nobody knows
And out in the backyard a great white oak tree
no need to debrief him, he knows the whole story
that oh nobody knows


and I've been wondering if I took you up on that old offer
​would you have really let me stay and could I have stayed my hands


Threw all of my bottles into a silent sea
she just says baby, I'm still a mystery
but up on the surface, life's just a big parade
clean-cut and shiny and faster by the decade


But I've been wondering how the years go by and all these questions draw me tight
never cross my mind in daylight, oh they keep me up at night
and I've been wondering if you ever want to knock the pieces from the game
when all the others were just stand-ins and replacements for your name
and I've been wondering if I took you up on that old offer
would you have really let me stay and could I have stayed my hands

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