Sunk costs
Flying in the face of my claim that I never finish anything are the 80-odd (and I do mean odd) "songs" that I've "written" over the last 40 years. I've also finished writing a couple of memoirs, some silly poems, a couple of screenplays, and a handful of short stories, but each of those was a brief dalliance, while this songwriting thing has been a constant habit since my days as a homesick, teenage Leonard Cohen fan in France.
Once, in about 1979, I even finished a whole musical play, based on the story of Tarzan. Cleverly titled Tarzan!, this work was consigned to the junk drawer of history when the one person who read it made some less than glowing comments about it. The only songs I remember now are "Jungle ABC" (with such catchy lines as "The mangos in Katanga stay mainly in the trees."), "Back In Baltimore" (where they're "just now having lunch" and "now drinking rum punch"), and an environmentalist anthem called something sappy like "We'll Keep The Land Alive."
Despite receiving no encouragement to pursue this hobby, I simply could not stop. It was like a nervous tic. On more than one occasion I would realize that for several minutes my brain had been replaying a musical rendition of something I'd seen or heard, e.g., the temperature and time of day on a bank sign.
Every now and then I would create a song parody for performance at a special event (recruiting others to perform it, because I found the whole endeavor way too embarrassing), but most of my output consisted of self-indulgent, self-pitying lyrics set to melodies that were either too imitative or too weird. Though I had the good sense never to play these songs in public, I did occasionally play them (usually in the form of cringe-worthy homemade recordings) for a friend or family member. No one ever suggested that I should keep at it (though, in fairness, I should acknowledge that someone did call some of them "good songs" recently).
The knowledge (or suspicion anyway) that what I was composing was, for the most part, utter crap did not keep me from continuing to spend many hours a week making up pitiful ditties and strumming them furtively on a guitar. I could have invested some of this time in getting good at actually playing the guitar, not to mention all the ways I could have been making the world a better place instead of feeding my habit.
I could have at least tried to put some of these songs on paper, just in case I became famous for something else--like mass murder--which would give people a morbid fascination with my creative output. Finally, this summer, I took a stab at doing just that (the scores, not the murder). I had thought about auditing a music theory course, but decided to see how much I could get done on my own. It turns out that writing music, like so many other tasks in the computer age, has become incredibly easy. You don't need paper, pencils, or even much knowledge of music theory. During a 30-day trial of Sibelius 7 First I managed to complete 17 scores; for most of those I also exported an audio version. Now I'm trying an open-source program called MuseScore, which is a bit clunkier; I may opt later for a trial of Sibelius's main competitor, Finale.
I feel pretty silly using any of this sophisticated software, as most of my scores are nothing more than simple melody lines, with no accompaniment or even chord symbols. I may go back and add embellishments, but for now the idea is just to let my legions of fans (after I commit that murder) know how I intended the songs to sound. I started with the songs that have never been recorded, but I'm including some for which the recordings I made are particularly shoddy.
The obvious question is: Why would I spend so much time creating scores for what I suspect are lousy songs? The answer is one that most economists would frown upon: Having invested so much time in creating these songs in my head, I feel an illogical need to invest even more time in putting them in a tangible form. Since time is money, you could say that I'm throwing good money after bad. But at least I'm relearning a little of the music theory I acquired many years ago. And I guess there are more destructive ways to spend one's time, like committing mass murder.