If it feels good - do it, they say. Well I guess that's part of it. I wouldn't consider myself the most adequate of guitar players, I guess I see it as just a tool to get the job done. I'm not that musical, I don't hear melodies in the buzz of traffic or the lilt of a persons voice. I can't read music or write notation but I could find the chords of a tune on the guitar but I won't be able to tell you what key it's in because, well, that's not really important to me.
I write songs as a way to reach people - I guess that's as much as it is - never having been that much of a people person inasmuch as I'm kind of a loner, I don't make friends too easily (makes me sound like a psychopath- eek!) but I think that I have some deal of compassion. Music gets me through, it always has done. I like music that is uncomplicated but deep, that comes from the heart. People playing other people's songs get to be a drag. You can only interpret so much, but then I suppose there are people for whom interpretation is everything. It is possible to define the world you see through other artists language - not just by banging out Louie, Louie on yer garage sale electrical guitar, but in the way that a song moves you, in the way that you want to make it your own. I've been bashing away at Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner for years now because it's one of those songs that just stuck in my head - I don't know why - there have been books written on such a thing (which I have to admit I've not read, yet) but it, perhaps, comes down to the individual.
I've never seen myself as making money out of playing, it's not really my thing. It all comes down to the song. As we compose, scribble, cry or get drunk with our little sheaf of papers, we're revealing things about ourselves that we wouldn't tell our loved ones or our shrinks. Think of all the songs you listen to and try to analyse, what they mean, what the writer wanted to say and what they ended up saying by the end of it all. I'm a firm believer in writing as autobiography- that everything relates to my perception and experience of the world - and that my drive to write about what I see, or read or hear is coming directly from my own reaction to these things.
I think my point here is that this is also what drives me to listen so obsessively to so many differing artists, so many writers and musicians, I think about all the time flowing through their heads, their thought processes, their emotive phrasing that could be only relevant to a single moment of their lives and I wonder what other people get from a song. How do we define why we listen to music? What little mechanism in our minds that snaps into awareness as we hear a familiar beat, a rhythm, a vowel sound and then at what point do we disconnect after? Does it ever stop, do record collectors (you know the type) simply switch over to obsessive compulsive fetishism at some point and lose interest in the content. I mean to say, there are records we buy simply because of their ridiculousness and never play, well, maybe half a side..
If you're expecting a nice, succinct summation of this post then you'll be disappointed, as usual I am in a bit of a contemplative mood and this is the result. To search for a meaning in it all is perhaps the wrong way to look at it but a constant awareness, a self-vigilance is probably not a bad way to go.
I hope you realise that I'm not really talking about myself here, just trying to reach out and make a little sense of what's around us..
