I Don't Want to Make Music - I'm Compelled....

I don't want to make music - I'm compelled. Begged for a piano when 3 - read music before words -

My ability to make music scares me sometimes. Words - I'll get - I used to, like, in school, after having to learn a poem - I'd get a rhyming pattern stuck in my head, and write, literally, 15, 20, 30 pages - endlessly - with Dr. Seuss rock-solid meter, nonsense! I can write rhyming iambic pentameter couplets faster - really - than prose. I once wrote 75 or so Christmas cards that way - rhyming -

As for music (when I make songs, now, I often just make up the words as I sing - it's usually better that way - though there is some refinement, winnowing...)

But music itself - the song - In My Song - from my next LP (first full-length album! - mid 2010  - yeah!!!!)  - I literally and seriously sat down and played it, from beginning to end, with most of the lyrics - never having heard, imagined, written, thought it - it didn't exist, I sat down and played it through, straight through - it scares me when I think about it. It scares me.

I know that people like Lennon/McCartney, Michael Jackson - all sorts of people - Tom Petty, I read in a book someplace - feel that songs come from some magical place - like, God or something.

I feel different, somewhat.

For one - almost every song - well, some come just when I'm dreamy - but a large number came when despondent. It worries me about being happy - will I ever write another? Well, I've got enough to last several lifetimes!

And - say, with In My Song - I feel - I know - I don't know - aaaugh!!! I was despondent, I sat down and played straight through a never-before-heard song - and when done - was at peace with myself and the universe.

So - I don't feel that songs come from a magical place - not at all - I feel I'm in a magical place - I once, literally, saw a golden light suffuse a room I was in - when the song Know No Fear came to me.

I don't write songs.

And songs don't come to me from elsewhere.

Magic happens - I feel better - and a song exists - that, apparently, seems to have that same effect on others.

I'll never forget someone who wrote this, back in the day:

"Your music really made me think. I've been in some trouble, and haven't been able to decide what to do. After listening to Falling Out of Time it clicked. I know what to do! Thank you so much!

I'll be one of the first to buy your CD's!

Love and Cookies,"

- dimples


That makes it all worthwhile -

It's okay if they're stupid, or catchy, or fun, or anything else they might be - these songs have the power to change lives, as they've changed mine, and other people's lives, too. They're fun - they're cool - but they're magic, too - -

AW