Songwriting

I write about songwriting so often because songwriting is the only thing that I have ever truly cared about. I have never written a song for no reason. Every song carries the fingerprint of a moment that once lived and breathed inside me: an experience, an emotion, an infatuation, a desire, a disappointment, a regret, a triumph, an argument with the world, an argument with myself, a relationship that flourished or failed, a belief I clung to or abandoned. Sometimes it was nothing more than the excitement of a clever phrase arriving at exactly the right moment like an unexpected guest at the door for some word-play. .

Every song has had a life before it became a recording.

For years, they were written entirely by hand. I still have binders filled with lyrics scratched out by my teenage right hand long before computers became part of the process. Around 2006, Word documents and Blogger replaced notebooks and loose paper, but the impulse remained exactly the same: catch the feeling before it disappears.

Every song was recorded somehow. Cheap cassette machines. Walkmans. Four-tracks. Home studios. Real studios. I have spent enormous amounts of time, money, tape, energy, hope, and patience recording songs with people I will never see again. Some of those songs were played to packed rooms. Others were performed for bartenders, bouncers, open mic regulars, distracted strangers, or a handful of exhausted musicians in rehearsal spaces that smelled like dust and warm amplifiers.

But they were played.

And somehow, through every relocation, every disaster, every wrong turn, every period of uncertainty, I managed to preserve the recordings. I protected them with a devotion I could not always extend to the people around me. Most of my relatives are gone now. Many of my closest friends and collaborators are dead. I could not save them.

But I still have tapes from 1976.

Some people document their lives through journals, photographs, scrapbooks, or diaries. My life exists in recordings. Until 2012, most of those tapes sat boxed away in storage facilities or hidden in corners of whatever room I happened to be renting at the time. Then, after finally finding stability, I was able to begin opening the archive again. For the first time in decades, I could listen carefully, organize things, restore them, and continue building upon them.

Now I am retired. For the first time in my life, I possess both the time and the mental space to devote myself completely to this work. So that is what I do. Every day. Hour after hour. Song after song.

And the truth is, almost nobody cares.

But I do.

That turns out to be enough.

I never wanted fame badly enough to destroy myself chasing it. I never wanted to turn music into a transaction. That is why the recordings remain freely available wherever I can upload them. Bandcamp. SoundCloud. ReverbNation. Facebook. I do not want anyone’s money. I have survived. I have what I need. If someone finds one of the songs and enjoys it, that is sufficient reward.

I may never leave behind wealth, institutions, or descendants carrying my name into the future. But I can leave evidence that I was here. I can leave the accumulated sound of a human life thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, failing, recovering, and continuing.

That is what the recordings are.

Not a career.

Not a product.

A residue of existence.

And perhaps, long after I am gone, someone somewhere will stumble across one of those old songs and hear a voice reaching out from another century saying:

“I was here too.”