YOU CAN'T LIVE ON CANDY!

I'm putting the finishing touches on an album's worth of material, music that was mostly written by me after an explosion of creativity last year when I did The Artist's Way and began to take the guitar seriously. Writing music  is no longer this thing that I watch other people do and sometimes participate in as a lyricist or a singer.  It's become this wonderful release that happens sometimes.  I can walk down the street and hear the back end of an argument a couple is having and write a song about what I think they're going through.  Or I can remember something that actually happened to me--a  relationship, a tragic incident, whatever.  The next thing you know, I'm  playing it for someone and after awhile they'll ask me, "What's this song
about, anyway?"   I figure they're going to emotionally project  whatever they want onto the material no matter what I say so usually that's  when I change the subject.

It's all about following the creative impetus, basically. It's in me and it's gots to come out.  What form it chooses to take is what's turning out to be the more interesting side of my creative life these days--especially when  I have an idea that won't leave me alone.  Sometimes songwriting is the best way for me to say something that's especially painful or complex. Surprisingly enough, I've found my own way of saying it.  That's a long way from just being happy that I could be a part of the junior choir or the all state chorale or whatever, open my mouth and have pretty sounds come out.  That's always something to be happy about, believe me. It's just not all there is to it for me anymore.  It hasn't been for a really long time.

I like guitars.  I don't  know if I'll ever take a blazing solo on a gig, like all of a sudden I'm Al Di Mieola or something,  but its fun to mess around.  Now that I'm getting better at writing songs about things that I refuse to talk about, somewhere inside all that fun is this serious sobering thing.  All of a sudden, it dawns on me that this is the third or fourth song I've written about someone I love that's died, or how sad I get, or how much it hurts to see someone else in pain.

These songs are definitely not for kids.  Not that I don't like kid stuff or really dopey pop music, but hey--you can't live on candy.