This week’s song comes from the folk album that features songs like Our Intermittent Life and Jane Shut Down the Fighting. It’s a simple acoustic ballad which in some ways I’d like to give a fuller arrangement to one day. But when I made it, I just wanted to do something stripped back that wouldn’t take long to finish.
Before I get to the meat of this week’s post: in 2018, I started keeping a monthly playlist of songs that were either new to me or which I had played a lot that month. Or which I just wanted to associate with that month for some reason. It’s never exhaustive, as I listen via a few different sources, but it’s a fun record to look back on. I thought I might start sharing some of them with you, so here is January 2024.
Okay, on to songwriting as a performance or posture. I Won’t Jump is ostensibly confessional. But when I wrote it in June 2021, I don’t recall that it expressed anything essential to my feelings at that moment. After I finished it, I sent it to a friend who responded, “You alright, bud?” To which I was like, “Yeah, doing very well!”
I think people often assume art is some kind of direct expression of an inner feeling. That’s sometimes true, but in my experience rarely the whole story. It often helps to have had feelings, of course! And if you’re uninspired, sometimes all you need is a new experience. But even if the root of a song is real, by the time a piece has been crafted into something finished, you’ve likely had to embellish or adjust the original truth in certain ways.1
This is why I think following an idea or working with a set of constraints are usually more useful paths forward than maintaining some kind of dogmatic fidelity to expression. If the original idea stemmed from a real experience, then great! Art-making can absolutely be cathartic! But if you think in terms of following the idea rather than your feelings, it makes it easier to take your ego out of the equation, and you stand a better chance of allowing yourself to be led into unfamiliar territory.
What strikes me about the practice of picking up a guitar to write a song is how easy it is to slip into the role of confession, especially romantic confession. It’s arguably the dominant pre-given model. So while I wasn’t expressing some solidified internal truth — although I undoubtedly drew on personal experience — I did slip into this well-worn role.
And while I’m happy with the song — it is honest and true, and I like the lyrical directness (I prefer songwriters to be frank, in general) — I can’t help but see the adoption of that posture as a bit…boring. In the end, it’s fine — I followed the idea, and until then I’d never recorded a song that was only guitar and vocals, so it was also territory unfamiliar to me. But the terrain itself has been well mapped. Not exhaustively: it’s never exhaustive, there’s always room to explore, and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. But just like we probably don’t need many more bluesy guitar solos in A minor pentatonic, we probably don’t need many more acoustic guitar-led confessional love songs. Then again, perhaps the relationship between craft/tradition/folklore and newness/idiosyncrasy/exploration is simply a key tension in my artistic practice.2 And any dogma is worth resisting so…a love song incoming next week?
Fun fact: at a couple of moments in the tune, you can hear faint swooshing sounds. These are artifacts left by de-noising software. It was very hot in June 2021, and I suppose I had a fan or something on while recording, the sound of which I mostly removed. I’m quite a fan (🙃) of the swooshes that I couldn’t get rid of.
I know that I'm lonely, I know that she's right, I know that I can't go on with this life, Though we know I can't afford to leave, And still keep my mind at ease. I know that there's living and just being alive, I know there's survival and the freedom to thrive. I can't afford to live my life just singing to the walls, But still I'm afraid to step outside the door. I know that she's lonely, and I'm not a good friend, I know that she just wants to be at peace again. And though I truly want the best for her, She'll have to break my heart to save hers. I know I want to live my life with the pain of being real, That once it's given, then it's gone, so I touch but cannot feel. So I know what we must do, I know that she's right, A home without a hearth is too cold to survive. And though I know her mind's made up, She'll have to push, 'cause I won't jump.
Mark Fell has an interesting perspective on artistic expression and intent. In this interview, he talks about having a grant application rejected because the reviewers wanted to hear less about the technology involved and more about the ‘artist’s vision behind the project’, to which he says: “I don’t really have an artistic vision because I don’t work like that: I fiddle around with technology…And also why should I?! I could use that language to sell the project to these people…I could start to talk about my glorious artistic vision…but why should I?… It’s almost like you’ve asked me to say, ‘How does your project enhance the glory of God?’ Like this hopelessly metaphysical language about artistic vision. We’re shooting right back into the 1600s… ‘How does it glorify the word of God, how does it transcend, how do you become one with the angels in the production of this work?’… It’s just stupid metaphysical language that just is about barriers…it’s about people being gatekeepers and their values determining who gets the cash… And the audiences that we’re dealing with are…working class kids who aren’t particularly engaged with that kind of world and [the project] would have connected with those kids.”
Perhaps the various tensions between expression, experience, individuality, spirit, universality, materiality, and function are core to any artistic practice.