It was this month, April, of 1994 when I'd written and recorded my final songs. A batch of them occurred, along with a couple of instrumental things, that filled the side of a C-60 cassette tape, the most commonplace mode of "delivery" by an underground broke-ass musician such as I was. Over the course of about a fortnight, I would be making-up songs as I walked down the street or be awakening with them after some other persons had sung them to me in dreams. I felt hijacked by my muse. To listen to those four-track recordings now would make me cringe, due to my having been an even worse singer than I am now, but also to my folky-dokey scraping-away at an acoustic guitar on most of them. I haven't been "that guy" in a long time; in more ways than one, so much the better. The melodies and the lyrics, on the other hand, are as good as any from any era of my now-40 years of music-and-lyrics writing (not counting the things that I'd started writing at age 12 and through my adolescence). One of the songs has the most complex chord structure of any song I've ever written, but not so uncommon during my "jazz" phase.
Not long after I had completed that batch of songs, I somehow came to the decision to never write any more; to abandon music-making in order to focus upon matters of life from which living for my art had distracted me. I would try to explain to people that I'd quit music for the same reason that a junkie quits heroin, but they would usually interpret that as my saying that I'd had a heroin-abuse problem. Some people would ask with what I had replaced music-making, but that was like asking what one had used for occupying the space that an excised tumor had encumbered. Non-musicians couldn't understand what it had been that I'd given-up, and musicians couldn't understand why I would. Kind of like when you tell your drinking buddies that you've quit alcohol, they don't know what to do with you, anymore, and in short order you fall off their social radar.
When you quit alcohol, you tend not to want to go to bars anymore; not even for the sake of hearing live music. Talking with drunk persons while sober is still having drunken conversations. Similarly, once I'd quit music-making, I tended not to associate with musicians any longer. But that was part of the trajectory that I had to embrace. I grew apart from the music world and was indifferent to the latest indie bands, who, by the indications I might glean from peripheral contact, seemed to be derivatives of bands I'd known personally and were having to let recede into the background of personal history, far from relevance to what was becoming my post-music life and self-identity.
In the years since then, I might have an idea for a song, or awaken in the morning with an entire song in my head, delivered to me in the dream I'd had, but I'd shoo it away like it were a pesky fly or a family of rats that had taken-up residence in my closet and was inviting their relatives and friends from other parts of the country to come stay and party for Lynyrd Skynyrd Weekend. One Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I'd awakened with a different song each day composed and served to me on the pillow next to my ear – but sorry, each of them had to go before it would hook me back into my former way of life. Such was my resolve to abstain from the destructive behavior of a former addiction.
In Spring of 2009, 15 years after I'd quit music-making "for good," a 19-year-old showed me the Garageband application on my first Mac computer. When he showed me how easy it was to get started in it, something clicked in my mind; I knew that it was safe for me to make music again, and moreover, that it seemed imperative that I should. What ensued was my reconstituting my musicianship and my songwriting from the ground upward, all over again.
After I'd been riding along on the wave of novelty and low-key elation for a while, I suddenly hit the speed bump of trepidation. I was now expressing things that were candid in a manner that made me feel as though my cranium were opened and my brain exposed. I felt as though I might go insane from this, until I recalled that that was how I'd begun with this before; to make art from the terror that people trivialize as "mental illness." I knew that as long as I just kept making the piece or the song on which I was working, I'd weather the storm and come out feeling purged and renewed.
I also made a pact with myself: whenever I'd think, "Oh, I shouldn't say that," it was the reason why I should. It's what really was there. One of the coolest compliments I got was, "Our society isn't ready for this song." Other people would say, "That song was really hard to listen to." My reply to that was, "Imagine what it had been like for me to make that song." Some of my favorite stuff by this new version of "me" is the more "unsettling" stuff – some of it makes me laugh. It's good to be able to laugh at what had formerly terrified you. That's what making art is for. One album I did, as "Kleinabermein," was too terrifying to release. I can't listen to it, myself, because there is so much evil in it, and it's not maleficence that came from within me, but from the objectively-derived subject matter. That's the only instance in which I've felt that I'd gone "too far," and I feel it judiciously responsible to have restrained it. If anyone can't handle something that I've created, they might be inclined to hold me accountable for it, but it's not my problem anymore, it's theirs. I myself can't listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan for more than a couple of songs, because I hear the pain of violence.
Having had to reconstitute my songwriting from scratch, and given how it has taken its self-guiding course since then, I can't relate to writing a song on acoustic guitar, anymore, and – as I had stated at the outset – I can't relate to the guy I'd been who'd done such a thing. It's the main reason why I don't make what I call "my 20th-Century music by me" available. I feel discomfort with the jackass that "he" had been back then. When I listen to "him" performing those songs, I feel as though I'm eavesdropping on my wayward son with whom I should have spent some substantial dad-time. Then I console myself with that that had been some other jerk's job.
The only real constant along this half-century-long excursion has been the composition of lyrics, which seems to come from a part of my brain that had developed, at age 12, such as to re-contextualize events and perceptions into rhyme schemes, semantic juxtapositions, and wordplay. I remain surprised that that had survived the 15-year-long effort to snuff it, but in essence, it was how my young brain had developed to process stuff and make sense of it, and I've been stuck with it ever since. Even if my early songs be naïve, their words are well-chosen, the lines are concise, and the verses are effective in pushing the substance along. Somewhere along the way, I learned that a good song has a punch-line, which brings wit to the proceedings, even if the song is about wanting to kill people. More people raised to be serial killers should have become songwriters instead, although that seemed to fare better for G.G. Allin than for Leonard Cohen.
As I chugged along with my artistic renaissance, of course I wanted to share my joy and pride of accomplishment with friends. Although I did get some positive responses to it, no one who might have had the perspective on my background acknowledged what a marvel it was. (Could Mom maybe have just proudly stuck my scribbling on the 'fridge?!) I began to notice a dearth of encouragement from people close to me. Even when someone would enjoy something I did, it would be leavened with some subtle disparagement or a wisecrack. People would tell me things along the lines of "what you should have done there" or "what I would have done here," or tell me what I should add or take away from the arrangement. One guy was stunned by the music and the arrangement of one particular song, but criticized my singing, which was intentionally offhand and a bit off-key (in homage to Allan Sherman). Since the music was impeccable, but all synthetic, he had to fault the obviously-human and most personal aspect of it. I could cite further examples of both subtle and blatant abreactions of "friends" to my finally realizing my lifelong potential, but the fact is that that – not the music itself – was what they found unsettling or to which they objected. I was defying the idea that they wanted to maintain of me for their convenience.
As the great killer-songwriter Leonard Cohen had put it in one of his songs, "You loved me as a loser; now you're worried that I just might win." People will call you a "loser" and never help you to win. They'll enjoy talking about what a failure you are instead of helping you to succeed. People will react to some hardship you're going through by telling you that "it could be worse," when "It should be better" is what you ought to be hearing. Such things started coming to light in my mind as people who, due to their status as longtime friends, had subtle digs or explicit maledictions to offer in response to the spectacle of my producing an album per month for several years on end. I also noticed that those who claimed to laud my accomplishment never lifted a finger to let others know about it. I detest musicians who aggressively clamor for others to undertake every little procedure to help promote their music, but how much skin off a scrotum might it cost to compose an e-mail with the subject line "Listen to this man's music," and the body of it containing simply the URL of my website or Soundcloud page?
Thus, I was forced to re-assess my relationships, but aside from any conscious effort on my part, there also seemed to be an alchemical transformation occurring. One man I knew said that when he'd complete a sculpture there would be a significant change in his life, because when one creates art, one is "changing the order of things." As I kept making my new music by me, some people silently fell away from my life, and I didn't miss 'em. Others were more difficult to banish. The fukheds who took the longest disappeared after dramatic falling-outs, and my good-riddance gesture toward them has been to never refer to them unless necessary, and then, never by name. It is said that just speaking the name of a particular demon will invoke it.
When I was in my 20s, I had a girlfriend who often told me to put my guitar down and "pay attention to meeeeee!" After she broke my heart, I still played my guitar. I wrote a song about her, and my life went on. After I fell-out with all of my friends because I realized that they didn't want me to be happy nor successful, I still kept making music. After I'd been kicked-out of my own family, what had I had? Some sense that I could and should make music, write songs, and not kill people. Such has been my true success in life, and, with notable but ultimately-negligible exception, with hardly anyone's help. This ". . . by me" thing goes deeper than you might want to know.