My Most Hated Love Song

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it finally happened.

I finally wrote my first love song.

Not a big deal, you think? It is, for me. Try as hard as I might (and believe me when I say I have tried), I've never been able to write a love song that hasn't either boiled down to "You miserable witch, come back to me..." or "You miserable witch, get away from me..." And thus has been my "love song" output for the entire time since I started writing. Depressing, isn't it? I read some of the stuff I've written in the past few years and just want to tell myself to cheer up, life's not so bad, and then condescendingly give myself a noogie.

Perhaps the greatest single truth of "artistic" (and isn't that a pretentious little word) lives is that misery bears productivity. I'll put it this way: I'm never really happy unless I'm working (writing, etc), but I'm never writing unless I'm miserable. Which says, I guess, that I'm never truly happy until I'm truly miserable. Weird, when you think about it. I choose not to, most of the time. So have I been miserable lately? Not really, I don't think.

Ever heard somebody say "confession is good for the soul?" Whoever thought up that amusing little piece of tripe obviously never had much to confess, and needs to be found and summarily shot. Along those lines, the single greatest thing about songwriting is that it is confession, plain and simple, and confession that doesn't even require words. For example: the new northvia song (my ambiguously titled love song, which, by the way, is not the actual song title) is an instrumental.

Can a song with no words be a love song? I think so. The meaning is completely in the intent of the writer, I think (although the meaning is instantly blurred when exposed to the imaginations of others). This particular song, as with most instrumental music (at least for us), was written with certain images in mind; the smile of someone you care about, the exact shade of their eyes, the way the sunlight catches their hair and frames a halo around their head, etc.

I've always liked the line in the Counting Crows song "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" (off their ambum "This Desert Life") where vocalist Adam Duritz sings "There's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing..." (referring, I'm assuming, to the Maria mentioned in the opening lines of "'Round Here" the lead-in track of their wholly great first album, "August and Everything After"). That's what my (and probably most other people's) songs are: those littles bits and pieces you could never put into words, those little things that you see and live through that you may not even notice at the time, but catch in your heart and brain like fish hooks, snagging you and digging in a little deeper over time. Most of the times these things hurt, but sometimes the hurt is sweet, a pain that you don't mind living with. A good kind of hurt. In a way, there's pieces of everyone I've ever loved swimming around the edges of everything I've ever written.

I've also moved into a new house since my last journal entry (a million years ago), and I love it. It's in a nicer neighborhood than my old one, and the house itself is situated slightly back in the woods, next to a little drainage stream and close to some train tracks. It's nice to live in an actual house, to have a front yard and back yard and driveway. The best part? At night, I can open my windows and listen to the crickets chirp, the faint gurgle of the stream, and the rumble-whistle of the occasional passing train (one of my favorite ever sounds). Life becomes still and peaceful, and once again I feel like a very small person in a large world. The thought is strangely comforting.

It's weird to think that at 22 I feel like I've hit the emotional age of 45. Everything behind you seems bright and pretty and looked at through a lens greased with nostalgia, and things ahead of you seem muddled and confused and vaguely frightening in a way that you can't be begin to understand. Things that remind you of how old you actually are and that there is an amazing and beautiful world out there waiting for you start to become more precious.

I suppose two of the themes that I briefly talked about above are part of the reason that I started a new series of writing, short little vignettes whose only names are locations and dates, but which I suspect are part of a larger body of writing I'd like to call "Moments In Grace." They're all very short so far, no more than a page or two at most, and most of them come in on the story in the middle and leave before it ends, offering only a glimpse of some event caught in time. I'd like to combine them with my photography, eventually, and see about getting it all published. I'll try to post some of these moments here (once they're edited, of course) in the future.

I think that's it for now. I'll try to post again in the near future (read: sometime in the next 100 years).

Thanks for reading. Feel free to check out the links. You might find something you like.

Reading:
Neil Gaiman- American Gods

Watching:
Lost In Translation (DVD)
City of Lost Children (DVD)

Listening:
Aarktica- Morning One EP
cLOUDDEAD- cLOUDDEAD
cLOUDDEAD- Ten
Early Day Miners- Let Us Garlands Bring
Early Day Miners- Sonograph EP (review pending)
Brian Eno/Harold Budd- Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror
Brian Eno- Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks
Explosions in the Sky- The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place
Ida- I Know About You
Ida- Ten Small Paces
Nanag Tatang- Muki
Lanterna- Elm Street
Lanterna- Sands
Sun Kil Moon- Ghosts of the Great Highway