I was at Studio Litho a few weeks ago recording some stuff. Just me and a guitar, a few folk covers and one original song. I've been writing again after a long drought following the Car Trouble record, which itself took me ten years to finish.
I started writing new songs in January and at the time of this writing I have close to an album's worth of new songs. It's definitely a return to form: acoustic guitar-driven pop with notes of folk and alt-country. Why now? What changed? I could point to any number of things: more vitamin D, antidepressants, a general attitude of fuck you buddy I'm gonna make something cool in response to unrelenting global chaos. But those just set the stage for the real work, which is annoyingly the same old thing it's always been. Get your instrument. Sit down. Start. (One of those new songs is about exactly that!)
I recently reconnected with a friend who is also a songwriter and we talked about the early years of blogging and MySpace and "being online" as a new thing. In hindsight it's obvious to me that I used a lot of that stuff as a replacement for and escape from writing songs, which has overall been a painful process for me. It was classic Pressfieldian resistance to think I could post my way to a career in music. I kinda-sorta posted my way to a tech career after all.
This year (and it has only been since this year) something has shifted. I spend anywhere from a few minutes to several hours writing each day, and if I get even a single good chord or line out it I call it a win. My brain has learned to game-ify the process as a kind of word puzzle and there's a dopamine hit that happens when a line suddenly clicks into place that didn't happen before. I'm tempted to write more about it, but it's too easy to backslide and I already feel like I should be doing anything else instead of writing this post.
Anyway, I'm really happy with this batch of new tunes. But don't expect to see them posted here anytime soon, because I've also gotten better at letting finished songs ferment a bit instead of rushing them out to the internet as fast as possible, only to have a far superior rhyme or phrase come to me weeks later. I'm also weighing the pros and cons of recording these new tunes DIY or heading into a studio. The latter is far, far more expensive but honestly recording in my bedroom doesn't help me make new friends or keep the ones I have. It's fun to have someone more experienced run the board, and it's fun to tell people that I sang my little songs into a microphone that is twenty years older than me and worth more than twice what we paid for our car.
And sometimes you get to do cool stuff like sit in a particularly cool chair!