Expectations of Familiarity
I haven’t talked about this directly on here, but I’m involved in a pretty cool project with Dan. I’ve been giving him writing assignments, with a topic and a perspective, and he turns that into five or so stanzas of content. Then he gives me a musical genre assignment for his poem, and I turn it into a song and record it. This is incredibly fun and a great way to kick start my creativity, which was lagging earlier this year. However, it’s fascinating to me how much easier it is to record these songs I’ve written with Dan than my own.
These pieces don’t expect anything out of me. We have no history. Conversely, my own songs expect too much of me. They demand a meticulous study of every note, every lyric. They second-guess all the choices I make for them, or at least imply disapproval at the direction I’m taking them. Many of these tracks have been with me for over half a decade; some even longer still. The promise of their finished form has become a mythical, unobtainable goal. I’ve spent much too much time with them without making concrete decisions about their identities, and because of that I’ve got a dozen or so different possibilities for each. A dozen identities they could easily slip into and inhabit forever. The fear, of course, is that I’ll choose wrong, and the moment I’ve passed the point of no return is the moment when I’ll remember something that would’ve informed my choices differently.
But these new songs just want to exist. They’re not picky; they’re not stuck up. They just want to get out into the world, and they don’t care how they make it there so long as they do.
