WHERE DO SONGS COME FROM: DECEMBER 2021
I'll admit it, my Patreon game is a work in progress but I'm having a good time writing a song a month for Matt and Steve and whatever we do next. Each tune comes with a Where Do Songs Come From essay, even though I DO NOT KNOW WHERE SONGS COME FROM!
Where Do Songs Come From
December 2021
Finishing What Ya Started
“Going To The Movies Alone” is a tune I started maybe 20 years ago and it is on a 4-track cassette somewhere. It has always come back to me--you know, if YOUR song doesn’t get coursing through YOUR limbs and stuck in YOUR head, it may not get activated in anyone else’s. So this unfinished business has been coming up to the surface and disappearing again for a long time.
Side note on a blessing/burden: I do have a radio in my head (not in my fillings or antennaed with a foil hat) and mostly it plays other peoples’ songs but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t play my own. WTF--you wanna be a songwriter and not like what you do as much as you like Iggy or Buck Owens? Get out of here.
This isn’t an admonition to always finish what you start. Sometimes the time is ripe to finish what you started and this just seemed like one of those times. It’s also true that I like going to the movies alone. This isn’t a bluff, or an outburst like Greg Brown’s phenomenally great tune “Just By Myself” or comic pathos like Johnny Cash’s also great “Beans For Breakfast". ("Probably got histoplasmosis, got no gun or I would kill them crows"). I really do on occasion like going to the movies alone and it preps me for being a better social animal--that time in the dark at a movie. So it’s totally fair game to write a song about something you like to do. There’s material there, right in front of you, and later you can write a prog rock song about robots or storming the gates of an interstellar castle, or an earnest political song even though you are a sideline sitter, or a song about bangin’ at the club even though you never go out.
Songs can change. Song can be edited, shrunk down from tons of writing or embroidered where thin. (Just don’t overwork it, get off the pot!). I think one of the thematic updates to this particular tune has to do with the culture of distraction being steroided up like a motherf*cker with smart phones and the advertising industry having, oh, about one trillion more ways get in our heads and unground our being in doubt and craving. I suppose back in the day it had a touch of the “leave me alone” to it but now it is about going temporarily off the grid, not in an Idaho bunker but at Screenland Armour in North Kansas City.
So it’s also ok to update your tune after a ripening of many years. However, anyone who has great success with a song and then updates it with a verse about Y2K or WiFi at Starbucks or something--that’s pretty lame and you should reconsider and just write a new song. Again, I don’t know where songs come from, and none of this may be true for you.