Strap On Your Boots

I sat down tonight with some free, home-alone time in which I thought I might make some good progress on some songwriting.  *fail buzzer*  This whole process continues to take me back to the old songwriting days.  In this case, I'm reexperiencing the struggle to finish something I've started, which wouldn't be so hard to struggle through if I didn't recognize that this is a theme that pervades my life.

Over the years, I've come to adopt many hobbies from being so curious about learning about so many different things.  Music was probably a first, having adopted it early on in grammar school, then sports, drawing and painting, learning languages, computer geeking, learning programming languages, to reading up on a variety of subjects of interest.  Blah.  College is where I really started to dig in to these things, and my interest in learning continued to grow.  The problem, however, that I've come to see over and over again is that instead of finishing, for example, Kierkegaard's "Fear and Loathing", I get too quickly interested in starting Tolkein's "The Two Towers", and the Kierkegaard just sits on my nightstand collecting dust.  ...and then shortly after, I choose to spend my time doing something other than finishing "The Two Towers", and then that book just sits on my nightstand collecting dust.  [continue pattern]

I've recently thought that this whole problem revolves around me not having enough time to do all these things that I want to do, but I've even more recently realized that the problem is not that I don't have the time, it's that I need to make the time.  So in the past couple of months, I've been trying to remind myself of this fact, and do something about my self-inflicted time problem. 

[enter problem as it relates to music] 
I've been taking at least one night a week and devoting it to songwriting; this has been quite fruitful, up until tonight.  I've got two songs mapped out about 3/4 of the way through, with multiple parts recorded and roughly mixed (although the mixing isn't necessary since the recordings are for composition's sake only)--two songs that I've been excited about for more than a day or two, which is rare (usually these songs fall prey to the aforementioned problem: losing interest and moving to something else).  The time I had tonight was a rare few hours that I get alone before the neighbors go to sleep, which means I can actually concentrate on playing parts and not worrying about playing too loud and pissing them off.  Awesome.  Except that only about 3 creative notes came out of my fingers all night long.

I sat down with new piece #2, which has this really simple & rhythmic piano line, with another simple bluesy/Irish guitar line over it, then some Bonhamesque drum sample (seriously, it sounds like I ripped it straight off "When the Levee Breaks"--I love it), plus some other knickknacks to spice it up.  Last session, I'd left the piece in a sort of ambiguous end where parts just sort of end here and there, but that the piece needs to keep driving and growing.  So, where better place to pick up?  I did some listening of this end part, of which I'd threw in some other samples just go get the idea out there of where I wanted to song to go, but just got annoyed at where this left the song.  So instead of fixing that, I spent my time re-recording the first guitar part, and hence blurped out those 3 creative notes of the night.  From there, I tried adding to the end (instead of pulling out the crap samples that don't really fit) and just got frustrated that I couldn't come up with anything.  At that point, it was about 9:45 and thought that I should just move on to something else, yet I didn't really have time to immerse in to another piece.

So I decided to pack up for the night.  I then again listened to the current state of the product and couldn't help but get more frustrated that I had no idea where to take this thing.  I feel like I've written myself in to a corner.  Gah.  I think the solution is to just wipe out all that excess crap that I don't like and start from scratch...?  Whatever the case, I get really disheartened when the "right" stuff just doesn't pour out.  It makes me want to just ditch it all and go pick up that Kierkegaard.  Or just go to sleep.

Let It Go
I suppose this is all part of the process, but sometimes I wish I could just birth the child, so to speak, without having to have that rise of inspiration inside.  I don't want to have to rely only on those rare times where I have time and am feeling that music inside ready to just pour itself out--those times are just way too hard to come by.

So I guess it's just one of those nights where you have to pick yourself up and know that the workbench is still laden with tools and half a product, waiting for you to come back to work and put the pieces together.  *sigh*  I guess we'll see.  It really is such a challenge for me to come back to it though.  I guess that's just what one has to do...