Eleanor Roosevelt and My Adventures in Songwriting

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”

I never thought I’d find myself quoting anyone named Eleanor, let alone the First Lady of the USA, but here we are. I’ve mentioned in a previous post (Starting a Band When You're 30) that my adventures in songwriting mostly consisted of 9 years of procrastination and self-imposed failure. What I didn’t realise at the time was that like anything, songwriting requires practice. What you never realise as a young musician is that although an album might be end-to-end 10-12 of great songs, the band probably wrote 5 times that many songs and discarded them as sub-par in the quality department. The result is that I should be about 35 by the time I start pumping out good tunes at any rate that could be remotely considered consistent. I’m OK with that.

So where am I going with this? Well, Eleanor’s chestnut of knowledge applies to songwriting. I mean really, what is a song but a discussion but an open letter to the world voicing your opinion about something? The key to good songs (so far as I can tell) is what you’ve got to say. If you write a song about boy-meets-girl-and-the-rest-is-history, or topical-politician/celebrity-is-immoral-and-doesn’t-deserve-your-respect, you’re not really discussing anything people haven’t heard before and nobody’s going to want to listen because they can easily get it elsewhere such as a school playground, the Oprah Winfrey show or tabloid newspapers. And chances are their lives are already flooded with at least one of those.

With events you’re stepping it up a notch, but essentially you’re just discussing people on a grander scale.

“Oh there was a flood today,
So many homes are washed away
And I should be on A Current Affair baby,
Because this is lame-eh?”

(When writing crap songs, be sure to include gratuitous use of the word “baby”)

I guess there’s something admirable in deciding to try and empathise with a larger group of people, it takes a bit of a leap to generalise a mass of people and not come off looking pretentious.

Ideas. That’s where the gold’s at, and I mean that in terms of quality because the masses will never take to music that makes them think no matter how far the ‘hipster’ fashion/lifestyle weasels its way into popular culture – skinny jeans and a shit haircut does not an art critic make. When it comes to writing songs that deal with ideas as opposed to the lesser content styles, the biggest hurdle seems to be getting over the idea that your songs need to make sense when you read it back to yourself. If you do that, you’ll never ever finish a song, take it from someone who knows that rather well. And if you have to make up a word, go for it, I wanted to say perspiring but I needed more syllables and so “perspirating” was born, and of the 4 or 5 people that have heard that song not one of them has noticed. Writing about ideas doesn’t mean completely abandoning people and events, but they need to be used to make a point; John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats is probably the undisputed king of this in regards to people, while Bob Dylan’s early work probably has the market cornered on the events side of things.

In no way by writing this am I suggesting that I’ve achieved the ability to write songs about ideas, quite the opposite in fact. I’m saying if you want to write good songs, aim for the ideas, but if you end up with people, keep writing anyway because it’s the only way you’re going to learn. For 10 years I tried too hard, when I learned to stop giving a damn, I learned to write songs, but like Texas Hold ‘Em, it takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master so I (and you) better get cracking.

Star Wars and the ethics of Artifical Intelligence.

Last night I was watching Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and just 15 minutes into the 2 hour film, C-3PO - the campiest gold humanoid robot in history - despairs with the words "Will this never end?'. Possibly the most thought provoking utterance in the much beloved saga, which for all it's other standouts leaves a little to be desired in the dialogue (just ask Alec Guinness, apparently he made many complaints to George Lucas about it). What's so special about this sentence? I'll tell you. The depth of this speech is unparalleled by anything throughout the 6 films of the series, here's why:

1. Firstly there is the very simple function it serves: It tells us about C-3PO's character. He's a fuss-pot, a dandy, a worrier, he represents the underlying neuroses of all the characters who are mostly wont to voice it themselves (with the exception of "I have a bad feeling about this" which is uttered no less than 7 times by 6 different characters). This point is especially pertinent given that as stated above, the sentence in question is uttered just 15 minutes into the first film of the series. In doing so it also sets him up as the perfect counterpoint to R2-D2, the representative of rebellion, fun and some damn good luck throughout the films.

2. Secondly, again this point relies on how quickly (or so it seems) C-3PO is willing to voice his desperation at how difficult his life has been. Did I mention it was 15 minutes into the first film? We're clear on that? Good. I'll continue. It represents incredible forward thinking on the part of Lucas, and if not forward thinking then just damn good world-creating. He simultaneously gave himself the room to create the much maligned (though loved by me and anyone that's not a pretentious douche) prequels, and set up the now infamous 'galaxy far, far away' as a place with an incredibly powerful sense of realism - this place existed before the film, and it will probably go on existing as the credits roll off the screen - brilliant thinking for 1977.

3. Thirdly, the melancholic part. Combined with an even earlier (9 minutes in) utterance from our gold friend "We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life", it's really quite devastating. Many films have been made about artificially intelligent beings becoming self-aware and setting out to destroy the human race in order to ensure their survival that I don't think we've ever stopped to consider the drive that would lead robots to take this sort of action. C-3PO is built by a young Anakin Skywalker, and then abandoned, unfinished on a poverty stricken desert planet as soon as the opportunity to run off with a bearded old Buddhist presents itself. The next 20-50 years of his life is filled with near death (as much a robot can 'die') experiences, witnessing the deaths of many young rebels and foxy, foxy Natalie Portman, as well as the rise of an authoritarian regime comparable to Nazi Germany (tip: Jedi = Jews). So by the time we reach the 15 minute mark of Episode IV, it's not surprising to hear that C-3PO is beginning to think that the entire purpose of his existence is to be made to suffer repeatedly and unendlingly in an incredibly Sisyphean sense (and Sisyphus is effing HEARTBREAKING, I even wrote a song about it).

Yet the human race, determined to make it's own life easier and pack in more leisure time continues the pursuit of automating our lives through technology at an alarmingly exponential rate. You have to ask yourself: Can artificially intelligent androids really be that far away? Where was the mobile phone 10 years ago?

I fear for the human obesity epidemic, for the rise of stupidity amongst the sole species on Earth to maintain food chain dominance for thousands of years, but mostly I fear for the plight of the robot. We would spend so much time trying to recreate something so close to human, and then treat it with such inhumanity.

The shame of it all.

The Sound of Silence

In no way do I consider myself remotely on par with Simon and Garfunkel, but I watched The Graduate tonight and The Sound of Silence features pretty heavily throughout, and whenever I wasn't spacing out on the mindbogglingly perfect imagery of the lyrics I was reminded of a poem I wrote for uni about this time a year ago and I decided to share it with the world. So when the revolution comes, I can now be held just as accountable as the next person for the flooding the internet with sub-standard attempts at creativity. Enjoy!

Empty heads in an
empty room.
Empty hearts,
empty everything

into something else.
Change its name,
its place.
its setting
its own table

upon which it will be
devoured like original sin.
The Original Inconvenience.

“Have an apple my dear,
I’m sure He won’t mind”.
It makes you wonder,
was it green or red?
an apple at all?
something else instead?

A hand grenade
would serve as well;
implications unending.
Famine and death and pestilence and war,
I think someone might’ve mentioned that before.
So one brother kills the other - 
someone else said that too –
and starts this mess
where we live:
to consume.
to fill the aforementioned

empty.

Empty this,
empty that,
into this,
back to that.
Call it a school,
of thoughts
of ships and things,
of hand-me-down
she-loves-me-nots,
of cabbages and
King St Wharf
nineteen-ninety-two:

I wasn’t there;
neither were you.
Took a twenty year sabbatical,
in some western wasteland
whose venom’s potency
lays in latency,
lays in waiting.
Hits you in the twenty-somethings,
right between the ears.
The biggest little city in the middle of here
we are,
the end of the line
the yellow brick road
from Return to Oz,
cracked and broken.
Forgotten.
Lost.
The beauty and wonder,
an hour away.
If you survive the transients
of transport;

Displacement:
neither here nor there;
no set state of being -
state like place,
not situation.
I wonder if this will go on forever,
if I can see it to the end.
Or who will be the end of who:
the hero or the villain,
Because,
after all, which is which?

God Shuffled His Feet

"Do you have to eat or get your hair cut in heaven? And if your eye got poked out in this life, would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?"

- Crash Test Dummies

Good questions. What is heaven? Popular culture would have us believe it's a city of clouds populated by haloed harp players, the Pentecostals would have us believe it's a place where you live in eternal happiness, and Atheists would have us ask "Exactly what the hell is that?". I'm an Atheist.

Happiness. Happiness is subjective. So if you're idea of happiness conflicts with the Christian idea of happiness, where does that leave you in relation to heaven? If your idea of fun is drunken and drug-fuelled hedonistic polygamistic unsafe sex, do you get to do that for eternity in heaven? No, you don't, so why would you want to go there? Christianity seems to use the idea of heaven as some incentive to submit to their belief system, but it's a paradox. If your idea of fun isn't my idea of fun, why would I want to spend eternity doing it?

Speaking of paradoxes, I picked this one up in Joe Hill's book "Horns". I don't have a direct quote so I'm again going to rely on my powers of paraphrase. It basically goes like this: If "God" wants you to go to heaven, and "The Devil" is meant to act as a deterrent to doing the "wrong" thing and in doing so make you behave yourself (so you can go to heaven). Doesn't that mean that God and The Devil are on the same side? And if that is the case, does that make them interchangeable?

2 Parts Apathy, 1 Part Despair

I gave up on punk rock philosophy as a viable alternative to reality a long time ago, but for some reason this still resonates with my general thinking about all things both important and redundant. I don't really know how to feel about that. How ironic.

The Amazon Kindle and My Attention Span.

I've got mixed feelings about the recent failure of the Borders chain of book stores. On the one hand I don't like that it seems the death of the book is finally at its beginning as well as the human cost in terms of jobs which is something I'm sadly all too aware of, and on the other I have some optimism that some time in the future this will precipitate the rise (resurrection? I don't know, I haven't been reading for that many years) of independent book stores, that have a bit of soul about them and don't just stock thousands of copies of whatever sentimental trash Oprah is touting that week.

So in order to tide myself over until that glorious day I bought a Kindle. There are various reasons for this that overrode my conscience about destroying the retail market of physical books, the first and most salient is this: eBooks are cheaper! I don't blame this on the retailers, I blame this on the government. Something about Australia's trade policy is so fucktarded that everything in this country is comparatively more expensive than it is elsewhere in the world and for no apparent reason other than Australia being a closed market as a lonely Western outcrop in the middle of Asia. And it's not just for 'obscure' things like books, iTunes, Coca-Cola, they're all in on it. Well, I say 'balls to that!'.

The second reason is selection, I live in the hub of unculturalism of Sydney: The West. Don't get me wrong I love it here, I love it a shitload better than the East. But nonetheless, finding a decent book out here is a chore and I'm a lazy, lazy man. I can't help but notice the reproductive nature of this situation; Stores stock shit books, so people don't read, so store stock shit books, etc etc ad nauseum. Bit sad really.

The third reason, and the actual point of this post is this: Page size. Due to the Kindle's ability to alter font size and therefore page length, your rate of page turns can go up or down. When I'm reading I like to feel like I'm accomplishing something, turning pages is good for me, it keeps me interested and that millisecond it takes to turn the page, combined with the actual function of pressing a button really helps me to stay focused. I have some symptoms that seem a lot like ADD, except since I'm smart and I did well in school no one will ever believe me when I say it, but the fact is I have a really high level of distractability. It's not a short attention span, it's an overactive one. Big difference. So the ability to do something slightly different while reading really helps to stay engaged with the story and in the end read for longer, which is great because I used to love the idea and result of reading (the stories are 100 times better than anything TV or film will ever produce), but hate the act of reading because I just couldn't stay focused for long enough.

It's amazing what a little bit of technology can do. Amazon and the Kindle have simultaneously destroyed books for future generations, and made them entirely more interesting to me. Since I've lost my altruism due to some personal events over the last decade or so, I'm glad to say I'm having fun and the world can go fuck itself.

There seems to be an inordinate amount of profanity in this post, I guess that means I'm passionate about it. I'm not a robot! Who knew? Stay tuned.

Starting a Band When You're 30

I'm 24, going on 25 and only this year have I finally cracked the nut on songwriting. My output in the last couple of months outstrips absolutely everything I've done in my 11 years of music. A couple of weeks ago I got to see the greatest band in history and existence, The Hold Steady, for the 3rd time. During the show, the leader singer doing a little intermission banter gave a brief history of his music career, I wish I'd recorded it but you'll just have to make do with my paraphrasing, it basically went like this:

"I'm 39 now. When I was 30 I worked in an office, and I was bored, so I called up some friends and started a band (cue applause). And the last 8 years of my life have been some of the greatest"

30? Maybe there's still hope. I think realistically I gave up on ambitions of a successfully creative life in music when I was 16, but now with the wisdom of all my years and finally the ability to pen a song from beginning to end (and even sometimes manage to record them) I've realised that success is relative. If I write a song from start to finish, that's a success. If I show it to my friends and they like it, that's a success. And if it goes no further and I'm content with that, I think that's the greatest success I can hope to achieve. Contentment can be the road to complacency, but so what? Contentment is nice, utopian even.

But songwriting isn't everything, and something I always knew but rarely acted on is the true message of Craig's little intermission speech: it's never too late to start. Hell it's why I started this blog. It's never too late, if you want to do something, do it, who knows? You might surprise yourself and be a worldwide success in 8 years, and if you're not, be content with your own successes.

This post is a little bit optimistic isn't it? I'm such an enigma. Stay tuned.