This blog post is inspired by something I recently wrote to Sidney Gish. I said in my email, "I think your music has genuinely taught me something about people and helped me understand others better..." and I think that sounds like praise, which it is, but it's something that is genuinely true when it comes to my writing.

When I am at work I will often listen to music. Listening to music I like is fun, but I like music more when I start to hear the lyrics. This doesn't really always happen at all or right away, but the more I listen to a song while doing something else, I will end up actually trying to comprehend what they are saying and what they might mean. I think this is a kind of silly mental trickery because for some artists, the writing of a song is a stringing together of things that sound good together and are clever. For others, it's a deeply emotional process. I'm not one hundred percent sure that we are equipped to tell the difference.

The Strokes have been for a long time one of my favorite bands, but they no longer dominate my end of year playlist. Let's take a look at their smash hit song The Adults Are Talking:

And don't go there 'cause you'll never return

I know you think of me when you think of her

But then it don't make sense when you're trying hard

To do the right thing but without recompense

This is actually good, emotional songwriting, and it makes you think. However, Julian Casablancas is an older guy and he is a long way from being a swashbuckling cool teen in New York City. So I will venture a guess and say that this is only sixty percent of the way there emotionally. What I think Julian did was write out several sentences over a few days that he liked, and picked the ones he wanted, and put those together. I just don't believe he's telling a story--I can't really explain why, but it's something to do with the last two lines. They're too unrelated. It's like we got the first sentence of four different paragaphs.

Let's take a look at Sidney Gish's Impostor Syndrome. This one is also critically acclaimed, but didn't win a Grammy.

Every other day I’m wondering

What’s a human being gotta be like?

What’s a way to just be competent?

These sweet instincts ruin my life

I am realizing halfway through this post that it might be that I respond better to on the nose songwriting. However, I will continue to defend this position. This is one that has stuck with me for a while. I think because music is a shorter medium, it is more impressive when you can say something with twentyish words that is intelligent and relatable. I like this stanza because it really gives beginning middle and end. It really is a story type of thing, and the more I listened to her work, the more I thought about that stanza.

I like it because I am not really like Sidney Gish, and I am especially not like the person she was when she wrote that song up. The person she describes in her album No Dogs Allowed is very prone to self-reflection, insecure about how others perceive them, withdraws affection when she receives it, and fixates on small details about people. I am pretty flawed myself, but I would say that I do not have all those flaws.

I think these kinds of quirks actually make for good characters in books, because I know people who are in one way or another very perceptive of the world around them, and I wanted to understand that better in order to write about it. This is something I applied heavily to the leads of Paint Dries as a Train Goes Off The Rails. More or less everyone in the book is walking around with a stomachache. So yes, everything is computer, and everything is data. Whenever something happens I try to download it into my brain, and then it will bubble up to the surface later in the book.

Where is the book?

Almost done! It has been a long process to get the book beta read, edited, and the cover made. I just got to see the first drafts of the final cover yesterday, and the final edits came in this weekend. So now I have to just keep tweaking it until I'm happy with it. The cover is a mixed media piece, sort of a collage with paint, and is on this huge canvas (like over a foot tall) and is incredibly impressive. I was shocked when I saw it, because the book is only going to be 6"x9" or around there. Once I start to scale up my social media presence I will be showing it off as much as I can. The last thing I need to do is have an author photo taken of myself. Unfortunately this is the one thing that has proven weirdly difficult.

Have a good summer!