Life As Soundtrack
One of the best parts about being a songwriter is that you kind of end up writing the soundtrack to your own life - at least the prolific parts of it.
I started writing songs in the winter of 1990-91, so that is 13 or so years of songs (and barely improved guitar playing skills).
But if I had started writing songs earlier, what might have come of it?
Would the 12-year old me have written Two Wheel Posse, a rap song, most likely, about how I would ride around the Red Hook projects in a pack of 7 or 9 kids on bikes prowling around, watching each others backs and looking for lone kids to menace?
Maybe 14-year old me would have written Token Blues, a play on me being a "subway" kind of kid and only one of three latinos in the entirety of my (mostly) lilly-white prep school to which I had earned a scholarship?
Seventeen Year old me might have written Exploding Clouds, a psychedelic paean in droning and screeching waa-waaed out guitar to my days of Dead listening and endless hits of black lightning bolts.
But I do know that 19-year old me wrote I might try to make you happy. My very first song which might have been the beginning of my realization that you can’t make another person happy just by being their boyfriend, and my first encounter with bi-polar disorder, depression and lithium. I could play that song until around 1995, but it is gone from memory now for the most part, and I doubt I have it written down anywhere.
He also wrote Cheap Wine not long after that, which still has one of my favorite hooks in any of my songs, Cheap wine will be our love / Cheap wine will serve as love / We’ll drink our fill of love / ‘Til we pass out on the kitchen floor. Which was inspired by the crazy parties, observations of co-dependent and abusive relationships and a string of convenient fuck-buddies.
The last song of that “era”, that I can recall, is Where is Heaven? , a building mess of psychedelic imagery exploding into a stream of consciousness description of my first bad trip. I was always certain acid was going to teach me so much about the world and about myself, and it did, just not in the way I had in mind.
Okay, I’ll stop talking about myself in the third person, it is getting a little weird…
Then came my in-between period, which also coincides with the formation of Zuckermann’s Famous Pig, my first (and only) New York Band. I have a hard time looking fondly on those songs, but I guess each one was a step towards where I was after and where I am now, which I guess it a step to wherever I will be with song-writing on the day I die.
1992-93
There was Away From You my cheesy attempt at an acoustic funk song with a riff I stole from some guys I jammed with in college. It became a Z.F.P. song, along with Boredom & Angst, which had the crucial line “I got the being 20 years old blues…” Pretty fucking funny, looking back now. My relationship with my family was really strained at the time, having dropped out of college, and being unemployed most of the time, and then dropping out of school (community college) again to play in the band. It was especially strained with my mother and my lyrics showed it. I remember Love is a Myth (jaded much?), which I was so happy with because of its catchy Beatlesque easily harmonized chorus. The third verse had lyrics like “Baby slipped out of mommy’s womb / Might as well have slipped into its tomb / Love is whatever mommy says / If this is being loved I’d rather be dead. ” Oi Vey! How melodramatic!
Next came what I would call the Franny & Zooey period, which was around the break-up of the band through to when I finally went back to college to finish for good. The songs I wrote then were much more introspective and honest, and maybe even a little vulnerable - which I think made for better songs for the most part, but also led to some serious cheese. Zooey was a huge influence on me at the time, not only with his mellow style of song-writing that had some very earnest expressions of emotion without the kind of vocabulary needed to really break through the barrier of having lyrical substance,
(That is not a put-down of Zooey’s songs. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and I think he would have a similar estimation of his songs of that time, and that is not saying his songs were not good, he wrote some incredible songs (especially in the latter half of this period, but this is an examination of my songs over time, not his, I will leave him to do his own).
but with exploration of chords and picking styles that I would never have discovered on my own and some of which I still can’t play to this day. We pushed each other, and it was a really prolific time for the both of us. I stole a lot from Zooey, from chord progression to lyrical snippets, I readily admit it and I give him all the props in the world. But let me take a step back and talk about some of these songs.
1994
To Mike was a song I wrote for the bassist of Z.F.P. that I don’t think I ever played for him. Ours was a close friendship frayed by different outlooks on life - funny how so much conflict in my life at that time was about my not having a job. The chorus was ”You can tell me I’m selfish / You can tell me I don’t share / You can tell me lazy / and that I don’t care / But that’s not fair.” I was working with real honesty in my lyrics then, and not sure how to deal with it when it came time to play these songs for people, so I often didn't; Like the lyric in that same song, “And I start to feel contempt for the people I call friends” and I did.
Another keystone of a song in that time period was Reach, which looking back is kind of cheesy, but it is a style of song I have come back to many times since then. Kind of ‘an advice to myself’ kind of song; a song to remind myself of something or some lesson I had half-learned. The bridge of that song was simply repeating three times ”You’re dream’s never gonna come true.” It was something I had to remind myself. It was something that was true and still is true. The chorus of that song really touched on some of the philosophical stuff I was playing with in the “in-between/Z.F.P.” period, but in a less melodramatic and cynical way. I sang, ”Reach inside and you’ll find that the soul’s the mind / Reach inside and you’ll find that there is a light / Reach inside and you’ll find who you want to be today / ‘Cause people change.”
Another of these “honest songs” was Love Lies (Hmm, I had to stop and play that because it had been so long - still a decent song) which came out when I was trying to write a love song for my girlfriend at the time, since I was about to go away to school up at New Paltz and she’d be staying in Brooklyn. I played it for her, and it was awful. She asked me what every single lyric meant, and I tried to play it off like it was just a song and that I was incapable of writing a straight love song, and that what came out was something inspired by all the things people were telling me about long-distance relationships and my being in a college environment, surrounded by young women. In my heart, I knew ‘Love Lies’ was the truth, but I could not admit it to myself, let alone her. I mean damn, the lyrics were so blatant… ”Come on baby, let’s lie to one another / Let’s tell each other that we’ll always be together / Come on baby, let’s lie to one another / Let’s say that the end will be never.” But still there was vulnerable and self-reflective truth in it (even if that doesn’t redeem me), like the bridge: ”When I hold you in my arms / Tell you I love you / that much is true / But still I dread tomorrow / Tomorrow has always made a liar of me”
1995
That song marked the end of first half of the Franny & Zooey period. The second part could probably be called the Lemongirl period. It started with the song Lemongirl, which, of course, was a straight up love song, written for the woman that would be my girlfriend for the next 2+ years, who inspired probably the next 50 songs I wrote, including most of the songs of what Zooey and I still refer to as ‘the summer of thirty songs’. Lemongirl represented the fusion of this honest/vulnerable lyrical style with a lack of fear of being quirky and obscure in my lyrical references, allowing for the listener to either understand, or fake understanding about the unique elements. Maybe it was all the Lyle Lovett I was listening to then, but it worked for me.
”You’re my Lemongirl and I love you when you drive me in your big beige car / Damn, Frim Framm! I had no plans to make you mine / But I’m satisfied just to look in your eyes.”
‘The big beige car’ also became a symbolic element that made an appearance in a few songs after that, and was a reference to the huge ’79 Impala she drove around in. The same can be said for ‘lemons’, which makes a few references in songs like Crazy Rain and If Love Were Food…”
All the songs of this period are of longing, love and sacrifice, which I guess you can probably say most of my songs are about. I also began to go back and take some of that “fake” stuff I wrote songs about in the in-between period and use it to extrapolate on themes that otherwise did not work in context of what was a great relationship at the time. Like Sun, Moon & Stars, which is about wanting to get it on with a girl who does nothing that her horoscope does not tell her to do. It was an expression of frustration with my girlfriend’s sometimes exasperating spiritual beliefs, but it came out in a different way and includes a reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, as Cassius said, “Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…” She was not really into astrology. We got it on all the time.
Oh, and another song that bears mentioning from this time has nothing to do with the girlfriend, but is a reference to Zooey. Called, The Only One, it was an expression of dissatisfaction with the growing distance in our friendship - More and more my songs were becoming means of directly expressing my emotions in complicated ways; in ways I could never just admit to other people, or even to myself. As I sang to Zooey in that song, ”You are the only one that know what I’m saying / You are the only one that know that when I sing I’m praying.”
Of course, the problem with writing these kinds of confessional songs was that people might begin to look for facts about your life in them, which was troublesome when it came to one song of that prolific summer, called Clinic, which was inspired by a late period, and my imagining sitting in a waiting room while my girlfriend got an abortion. That never happened, but more than once I had people ask me with concern about it after hearing the song. However, even if it had been true, I did not write the song about it in order to talk about it. As I said in a much more recent song, Live Without A Song:
”Callouses on the tips of my fingers / Pressing steel against wood / Expressing that thing that always lingers / Hammering out the feeling / Until it’s just another song I sing / It is another form of healing / In time I will not even feel the string.”
The number of songs tapers a great deal after that. There is The Problem of Being Human, which is still one of my favorites I have written and really encapsulates the feelings I was having then about how no matter how close you might feel to another person the distance between you is really an immeasurable gulf, and how relationships take a faith on par with belief in the divine. However, what I really love about this song is how the meaning of it has shifted for me over the years and always seems pertinent.
Except for two or three songs inspired by the woman I was going to marry (and thankfully didn’t), there is not much over the next two or three years until we get to Dizzy.
1998
No, wait there are two important songs of my life’s soundtrack before that one that I need to mention. There is The Best Thing, which I only named a couple of years ago when I put it on ‘will’. Before that it was just my angry song about my feelings about the end of my relationship with the Lemongirl. It was one of the few songs I ever wrote without a guitar and then later wrote music for the words and melody. What Zooey Says (Life is Crazy) was not a song about Zooey, but a song about my next girlfriend and the amazement of having someone who is a friend suddenly become a lover. It reinforced what Zooey always said, which is that life is crazy. ”Now everything has changed / I have sunshine after a long crazy rain / What was once obscured is now plain / What Zooey says is right / Life is crazy. It's insane.”
2002
Anyway, excepting Sunrise, Sunset (a song written by placing myself back to where I was during the protracted break-up with Lemongirl), Dizzy was the first song I had written in about four years. And the first song of what I would call my “Current Era”. Interestingly, it coincided with my hanging out with Zooey again after not seeing much of him for about 2 or 3 years, and his teaching me some new chords he had discovered. Yes, the spark that set off an explosion of song-writing I did not think was left in me came from once again ‘stealing’ from Zooey. If I ever make any serious money off my music I had better hire him on as a man-friend or something. You know, to bring the bitches and the Moet to the hotel room. . .
And then came the rush of songs, like Maybe…, a song that goes back and forth considering the options for some kind of relationship with a really good friend who was also the ex-girlfriend of another really good friend. There are too many songs in this period to really get into much detail about. One of my favorites is a nearly 9 minute long opus called Good Day (Come to My Place) . It was the first song I can clearly say was influenced by my listening to Ben Folds, and another song expressing both frustration and hope with a relationship. The first part is slow examination of how two different people might spend their day (me, hiking up in the mountains, her, laying around with her scummy housemates getting high - both of which are fun in their own way), and the second part is a raunchy rave up.
Lyrics examples, from the first part: ”I watched the sunlight play across the autumn leaves / As they swayed back and forth in that perfect breeze.”
While the second part has lyrics like: ”I’ll pull up that blue dress and kiss up those legs / And I’m not the one who usually begs / And before I press my face between those thighs / Let’s turn up the music to drown out those cries.”
But anyway, the reason this long-ass egoist essay even came into mind was because of my newest song, Shake My Life Up (the first in about 9 months) is another one of those soundtrack “moments” expressing something so tied to this time in my life and the feelings surrounding it, that I began to recollect all those other feelings and moments. This most recent one was born of me telling someone that I had not written a song since November. “Why not?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I just need someone or something to shake my life up.”
Boom.
The next day I got home and wrote the song. I have been working on a recording of it, but time has been scarce. I thought I would go home and work on it today, but now it looks like a potential life-shaker is going keep me from doing so, and shit… If that leads to yet another song it is totally worth it.
I apologize for the long-winded egotism, but I encourage other songwriters and artists to write a similar reflective essay. I would be fascinated to read it.
I started writing songs in the winter of 1990-91, so that is 13 or so years of songs (and barely improved guitar playing skills).
But if I had started writing songs earlier, what might have come of it?
Would the 12-year old me have written Two Wheel Posse, a rap song, most likely, about how I would ride around the Red Hook projects in a pack of 7 or 9 kids on bikes prowling around, watching each others backs and looking for lone kids to menace?
Maybe 14-year old me would have written Token Blues, a play on me being a "subway" kind of kid and only one of three latinos in the entirety of my (mostly) lilly-white prep school to which I had earned a scholarship?
Seventeen Year old me might have written Exploding Clouds, a psychedelic paean in droning and screeching waa-waaed out guitar to my days of Dead listening and endless hits of black lightning bolts.
But I do know that 19-year old me wrote I might try to make you happy. My very first song which might have been the beginning of my realization that you can’t make another person happy just by being their boyfriend, and my first encounter with bi-polar disorder, depression and lithium. I could play that song until around 1995, but it is gone from memory now for the most part, and I doubt I have it written down anywhere.
He also wrote Cheap Wine not long after that, which still has one of my favorite hooks in any of my songs, Cheap wine will be our love / Cheap wine will serve as love / We’ll drink our fill of love / ‘Til we pass out on the kitchen floor. Which was inspired by the crazy parties, observations of co-dependent and abusive relationships and a string of convenient fuck-buddies.
The last song of that “era”, that I can recall, is Where is Heaven? , a building mess of psychedelic imagery exploding into a stream of consciousness description of my first bad trip. I was always certain acid was going to teach me so much about the world and about myself, and it did, just not in the way I had in mind.
Okay, I’ll stop talking about myself in the third person, it is getting a little weird…
Then came my in-between period, which also coincides with the formation of Zuckermann’s Famous Pig, my first (and only) New York Band. I have a hard time looking fondly on those songs, but I guess each one was a step towards where I was after and where I am now, which I guess it a step to wherever I will be with song-writing on the day I die.
1992-93
There was Away From You my cheesy attempt at an acoustic funk song with a riff I stole from some guys I jammed with in college. It became a Z.F.P. song, along with Boredom & Angst, which had the crucial line “I got the being 20 years old blues…” Pretty fucking funny, looking back now. My relationship with my family was really strained at the time, having dropped out of college, and being unemployed most of the time, and then dropping out of school (community college) again to play in the band. It was especially strained with my mother and my lyrics showed it. I remember Love is a Myth (jaded much?), which I was so happy with because of its catchy Beatlesque easily harmonized chorus. The third verse had lyrics like “Baby slipped out of mommy’s womb / Might as well have slipped into its tomb / Love is whatever mommy says / If this is being loved I’d rather be dead. ” Oi Vey! How melodramatic!
Next came what I would call the Franny & Zooey period, which was around the break-up of the band through to when I finally went back to college to finish for good. The songs I wrote then were much more introspective and honest, and maybe even a little vulnerable - which I think made for better songs for the most part, but also led to some serious cheese. Zooey was a huge influence on me at the time, not only with his mellow style of song-writing that had some very earnest expressions of emotion without the kind of vocabulary needed to really break through the barrier of having lyrical substance,
(That is not a put-down of Zooey’s songs. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and I think he would have a similar estimation of his songs of that time, and that is not saying his songs were not good, he wrote some incredible songs (especially in the latter half of this period, but this is an examination of my songs over time, not his, I will leave him to do his own).
but with exploration of chords and picking styles that I would never have discovered on my own and some of which I still can’t play to this day. We pushed each other, and it was a really prolific time for the both of us. I stole a lot from Zooey, from chord progression to lyrical snippets, I readily admit it and I give him all the props in the world. But let me take a step back and talk about some of these songs.
1994
To Mike was a song I wrote for the bassist of Z.F.P. that I don’t think I ever played for him. Ours was a close friendship frayed by different outlooks on life - funny how so much conflict in my life at that time was about my not having a job. The chorus was ”You can tell me I’m selfish / You can tell me I don’t share / You can tell me lazy / and that I don’t care / But that’s not fair.” I was working with real honesty in my lyrics then, and not sure how to deal with it when it came time to play these songs for people, so I often didn't; Like the lyric in that same song, “And I start to feel contempt for the people I call friends” and I did.
Another keystone of a song in that time period was Reach, which looking back is kind of cheesy, but it is a style of song I have come back to many times since then. Kind of ‘an advice to myself’ kind of song; a song to remind myself of something or some lesson I had half-learned. The bridge of that song was simply repeating three times ”You’re dream’s never gonna come true.” It was something I had to remind myself. It was something that was true and still is true. The chorus of that song really touched on some of the philosophical stuff I was playing with in the “in-between/Z.F.P.” period, but in a less melodramatic and cynical way. I sang, ”Reach inside and you’ll find that the soul’s the mind / Reach inside and you’ll find that there is a light / Reach inside and you’ll find who you want to be today / ‘Cause people change.”
Another of these “honest songs” was Love Lies (Hmm, I had to stop and play that because it had been so long - still a decent song) which came out when I was trying to write a love song for my girlfriend at the time, since I was about to go away to school up at New Paltz and she’d be staying in Brooklyn. I played it for her, and it was awful. She asked me what every single lyric meant, and I tried to play it off like it was just a song and that I was incapable of writing a straight love song, and that what came out was something inspired by all the things people were telling me about long-distance relationships and my being in a college environment, surrounded by young women. In my heart, I knew ‘Love Lies’ was the truth, but I could not admit it to myself, let alone her. I mean damn, the lyrics were so blatant… ”Come on baby, let’s lie to one another / Let’s tell each other that we’ll always be together / Come on baby, let’s lie to one another / Let’s say that the end will be never.” But still there was vulnerable and self-reflective truth in it (even if that doesn’t redeem me), like the bridge: ”When I hold you in my arms / Tell you I love you / that much is true / But still I dread tomorrow / Tomorrow has always made a liar of me”
1995
That song marked the end of first half of the Franny & Zooey period. The second part could probably be called the Lemongirl period. It started with the song Lemongirl, which, of course, was a straight up love song, written for the woman that would be my girlfriend for the next 2+ years, who inspired probably the next 50 songs I wrote, including most of the songs of what Zooey and I still refer to as ‘the summer of thirty songs’. Lemongirl represented the fusion of this honest/vulnerable lyrical style with a lack of fear of being quirky and obscure in my lyrical references, allowing for the listener to either understand, or fake understanding about the unique elements. Maybe it was all the Lyle Lovett I was listening to then, but it worked for me.
”You’re my Lemongirl and I love you when you drive me in your big beige car / Damn, Frim Framm! I had no plans to make you mine / But I’m satisfied just to look in your eyes.”
‘The big beige car’ also became a symbolic element that made an appearance in a few songs after that, and was a reference to the huge ’79 Impala she drove around in. The same can be said for ‘lemons’, which makes a few references in songs like Crazy Rain and If Love Were Food…”
All the songs of this period are of longing, love and sacrifice, which I guess you can probably say most of my songs are about. I also began to go back and take some of that “fake” stuff I wrote songs about in the in-between period and use it to extrapolate on themes that otherwise did not work in context of what was a great relationship at the time. Like Sun, Moon & Stars, which is about wanting to get it on with a girl who does nothing that her horoscope does not tell her to do. It was an expression of frustration with my girlfriend’s sometimes exasperating spiritual beliefs, but it came out in a different way and includes a reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, as Cassius said, “Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…” She was not really into astrology. We got it on all the time.
Oh, and another song that bears mentioning from this time has nothing to do with the girlfriend, but is a reference to Zooey. Called, The Only One, it was an expression of dissatisfaction with the growing distance in our friendship - More and more my songs were becoming means of directly expressing my emotions in complicated ways; in ways I could never just admit to other people, or even to myself. As I sang to Zooey in that song, ”You are the only one that know what I’m saying / You are the only one that know that when I sing I’m praying.”
Of course, the problem with writing these kinds of confessional songs was that people might begin to look for facts about your life in them, which was troublesome when it came to one song of that prolific summer, called Clinic, which was inspired by a late period, and my imagining sitting in a waiting room while my girlfriend got an abortion. That never happened, but more than once I had people ask me with concern about it after hearing the song. However, even if it had been true, I did not write the song about it in order to talk about it. As I said in a much more recent song, Live Without A Song:
”Callouses on the tips of my fingers / Pressing steel against wood / Expressing that thing that always lingers / Hammering out the feeling / Until it’s just another song I sing / It is another form of healing / In time I will not even feel the string.”
The number of songs tapers a great deal after that. There is The Problem of Being Human, which is still one of my favorites I have written and really encapsulates the feelings I was having then about how no matter how close you might feel to another person the distance between you is really an immeasurable gulf, and how relationships take a faith on par with belief in the divine. However, what I really love about this song is how the meaning of it has shifted for me over the years and always seems pertinent.
Except for two or three songs inspired by the woman I was going to marry (and thankfully didn’t), there is not much over the next two or three years until we get to Dizzy.
1998
No, wait there are two important songs of my life’s soundtrack before that one that I need to mention. There is The Best Thing, which I only named a couple of years ago when I put it on ‘will’. Before that it was just my angry song about my feelings about the end of my relationship with the Lemongirl. It was one of the few songs I ever wrote without a guitar and then later wrote music for the words and melody. What Zooey Says (Life is Crazy) was not a song about Zooey, but a song about my next girlfriend and the amazement of having someone who is a friend suddenly become a lover. It reinforced what Zooey always said, which is that life is crazy. ”Now everything has changed / I have sunshine after a long crazy rain / What was once obscured is now plain / What Zooey says is right / Life is crazy. It's insane.”
2002
Anyway, excepting Sunrise, Sunset (a song written by placing myself back to where I was during the protracted break-up with Lemongirl), Dizzy was the first song I had written in about four years. And the first song of what I would call my “Current Era”. Interestingly, it coincided with my hanging out with Zooey again after not seeing much of him for about 2 or 3 years, and his teaching me some new chords he had discovered. Yes, the spark that set off an explosion of song-writing I did not think was left in me came from once again ‘stealing’ from Zooey. If I ever make any serious money off my music I had better hire him on as a man-friend or something. You know, to bring the bitches and the Moet to the hotel room. . .
And then came the rush of songs, like Maybe…, a song that goes back and forth considering the options for some kind of relationship with a really good friend who was also the ex-girlfriend of another really good friend. There are too many songs in this period to really get into much detail about. One of my favorites is a nearly 9 minute long opus called Good Day (Come to My Place) . It was the first song I can clearly say was influenced by my listening to Ben Folds, and another song expressing both frustration and hope with a relationship. The first part is slow examination of how two different people might spend their day (me, hiking up in the mountains, her, laying around with her scummy housemates getting high - both of which are fun in their own way), and the second part is a raunchy rave up.
Lyrics examples, from the first part: ”I watched the sunlight play across the autumn leaves / As they swayed back and forth in that perfect breeze.”
While the second part has lyrics like: ”I’ll pull up that blue dress and kiss up those legs / And I’m not the one who usually begs / And before I press my face between those thighs / Let’s turn up the music to drown out those cries.”
But anyway, the reason this long-ass egoist essay even came into mind was because of my newest song, Shake My Life Up (the first in about 9 months) is another one of those soundtrack “moments” expressing something so tied to this time in my life and the feelings surrounding it, that I began to recollect all those other feelings and moments. This most recent one was born of me telling someone that I had not written a song since November. “Why not?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I just need someone or something to shake my life up.”
Boom.
The next day I got home and wrote the song. I have been working on a recording of it, but time has been scarce. I thought I would go home and work on it today, but now it looks like a potential life-shaker is going keep me from doing so, and shit… If that leads to yet another song it is totally worth it.
I apologize for the long-winded egotism, but I encourage other songwriters and artists to write a similar reflective essay. I would be fascinated to read it.