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Critical Writings Courting the Muse "Courting the Muse"--from Sing Out!, volume 37, No. 2 Copyright 1992 The question "Why write songs?" is a valid one, and should be asked first. The question "How do you write songs?" will have different answers depending on one's response to the first question. My reply to these questions rests in my own history, and the discovery that my own healing has been tied inextricably to my community, whether I've chosen to define that community in family, local, intentional, or religious terms. My own quest for fame had come to a screeching halt midway through the 1970s, as I prepared to leave street singing for what seemed a more "responsible" full-time job maintaining candy-making and candy-wrapping machines (my training for which was being a folksinger who'd had to learn how to maintain old cars to get from one gig to the next). The advent of fatherhood demanded that I reexamine my life and make the appropriate adjustments. I prepared with some anguish and bitterness to turn my back on the idea of making music for a living, but in the process, some unexpected things happened. First of all, the process of reexamination revitalized my songwriting. Secondly, other artists, many of whom had played at the community coffeehouse I'd started in Marblehead, began to be attracted to my songs and started singing them. And because a lot of people my age were reexamining their own lives, the songs became popular in folksong-oriented communities. "Amateur" singers (etymologically, those who sing for love) began to sing my songs at important points of their lives (e.g. weddings and funerals), and through them my songs found a wide audience. Since those days it's been clear to me that I write songs for my own healing, that of my community, and that of my culture, and that those circles of healing are much more interdependent than might be assumed. Song is such a powerful medium that being a songwriter is a tremendous responsibility as well as a great privilege. As long as one looks for the points of connection among one's own struggles, those of one's community, and those of the larger (if not greater) culture, faithfulness to the truth (a spiritual discipline in itself) can result in songs becoming artifacts that go out on their own and facilitate healing in unknown lives and on unknown levels. I am currently making music full time, and it's not so much an industry that supports me in this, but rather a collection of small communities. It's from those communities that I get direct support from people who tell me that my songs are important in their lives. My advice to all songwriters, "amateur" or professional (and at this point I believe that these categories are irrelevant), is that they write songs for real audiences and real communities rather than imagined markets. "Amateurs" thus stand a chance of doing some good in the lives of those around them: the most vitality to be seen in any kind of American popular music is seen when that music is tied in to living cultural communities, whether urban or rural, whatever their ethnicity. "Professionals" can unleash creativity onto the media culture that may move it somewhat toward reality and health. It may take a while for the necessary risks of art to pay off to the business mind, but after a while they do. The money processes of capitalistic society tend to break up intentional artistic communities as they recruit their best artists for popular music, but new communities form. The music industry itself is breaking up and reforming as risk-taking small companies move in to serve markets abandoned by the major labels. When the majors see the success of smaller companies, they occasionally modify their own behavior accordingly. Rather than waiting for this or courting it, the sanest course for the many brilliant young writers out there, I think, is to stick to the job at hand and look to the community (and other communities) for support, This country is loaded with small venues and public radio stations that need genuinely good work. The personal computer is a great tool for accessing those venues and keeping in touch with a developing audience (and this, I think, is material for a whole other column). The alternative (spending lots of energy looking for a big contract) seems to me to be rather like staking your life on a lottery ticket. The risks of being an artist can and should be more properly broken up and taken one day at at time; the corresponding rewards are steadier and surer, and because they involve intimate contact with audiences, are more soul-nourishing as well. I wouldn't presume to review Tracy Spring's life and art (at last count she's still in the middle of both), but her new CD "Life and Art" is done, and it exhibits nearly everything I love about the Northwest music scene. Tracy's songs are thoughtful and accessible at the same time, and cover a wide range of basic human experience. The settings they are given here by Tracy and her producer Linda Waterfall are sublimely *musical*, done with intelligence that doesn't point to itself, but breathes life into every cut. Tracy is a natural born singer whose alto voice is a wonderful folk and pop instrument, and always under exquisite control. She's surrounded on this disc by a virtual Who's Who of Northwest musicians, including Ms. Waterfall, Orville Johnson, honorary Northwesterner Nina Gerber, Cary Black, Kim Scanlon, John Miller, Janet Peterson, and The Righteous Mothers. If you could afford this much talent at this level in Nashville or L.A., you probably wouldn't be allowed t! o exhibit this much fun at the same time--this CD isn't the product of an industry, but of a loving and supportive community of musicians. There is a generosity of spirit that shines through this disc, and not only in the fact that in 13 well crafted songs you get 51 minutes and 31 seconds of great-souled music. As any kind of CD I call that a bargain; as a debut, independently produced CD it's really remarkable. Cassette tapes won't be ready until September, but meanwhile the disc is available from AziZ Productions, P.O. Box 2221, Yakima, WA 98907, @$15 + $1.50 p&h. Disclaimer--I've played music for fun, and discussed life and art, with Tracy and a lot of the musicians on this CD, but I haven't received a penny from any of them--don't expect to, either. I've been spending a bit of time with Leslie Smith's CD "These Things Wrapped" (Waterbug WBG 0015). I've needed that time to absorb the new paradigm that Ms. Smith represents in the lower constructs of my aesthetic psyche: it just never occurred to me that anyone who could sing country well enough to remind me of Emmylou Harris could also write songs that cut as deeply as my first memories of Joni Mitchell. Darleen Wilson uses the talents of such luminaries as Johnny Cunningham, Duke Levine, John McGann, Matt Glaser and Ben Wittman to create a production that is both rich and transparent enough to let Ms. Smith's extraordinary art shine through. The resulting collaboration is tough and demanding rather than flashy, but ultimately brilliant, and quite thrilling even to a guy whose ears are as jaded as mine are these days: this is a much nobler work than the stuff that thinks of "acoustic music" as a sort of "pop lite". It's humbling that it took me this long to get it, but this is a major killer recording: who knows, maybe too good for the current marketplace, but just good enough for the ages. Disclaimer: I'm neither on Darleen Wilson's payroll nor Andrew Calhoun's, although I'm quite fond of them both, and proud of them for getting the work of Ms. Smith(whom I've never met) before the public. Advice to Songwriters (reprinted in folk_music) I post this at my friend Tracy Spring's request--it was originally a handout at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, directed toward my songwriting classes, but it might be useful for general audiences as well: The power of a good song, a song that is true to itself and to the experience of its listeners(and its listeners include the songwriter in the act of creation) can be astonishing to the point of fear. One good thing about the tin-pan-alley or Nashville systems, the pre-singer-songwriter systems, is that they relieve the songwriter of the burden of being identified as the instigator of the wondrous thing that happens. This is the burden of being asked to participate in what seems internally to be a monstrous lie. Songwriters at their best receive their songs, and work on them much as Michelangelo worked on sculpture, declaring that the form and figure were already there in the stone, and the artist's job was merely to free it. Good songs, great songs, are already present in the human spirit. It is the songwriter's job to recognize them and free them. As hard a time as I give the evangelical songwriters of the"Contemporary Christian Music" marketplace (and most do deserve the hard time I give them) their "cheerleading for Jesus" approach does identify the source of creativity as being outside the ego of the songwriter and the singer, and rejects this culture's insidiously destructive insistence on identifying the source with the ego. As insipid as most of these songs might be, the joy their perpetrators feel in singing them may indeed be genuine. The truth they express--that the source of creativity is outside of the ego--is one that the music industry and the culture at large spends an awful lot of energy denying, for if I don't own my creativity, how do I dare try to make money from it? "Intellectual property" is a convenient fiction that psychologically enables the buying and selling what artists experience as a free gift, but the artist that mistakes this convenient fiction for the truth begins to look for the source of creativity in what is, after all, a flawed, easily distracted, easily frightened human vessel. At that point the artist takes on too much responsibility, or at any rate, a mistaken responsibility. Do you want to write songs? All right, then. Your job is not to create out of nothing, but rather to listen. Listen first to other artists, and especially to other artists of the word and of music (although a half an hour with Martha Graham might be worth 20 years of Neil Diamond). Listen to Dickens delight in the possibilities of language in telling a story. Listento Glenn Gould playing Bach, and discovering joy in the beauty of intellect. Listen to any blues singer to discover what the human voice can say within the discipline of a five-note scale. Listen not to the marketplace, but to the human beings who make it up. Listen to them as if the marketplace itself was closed down for the Sabbath--it will reopen again soon enough. Listen with your audience to the same Source they listen for, and recognize when it speaks out of the silence. That silence can be cold and terrifying, as terrifying as death. But it is ultimately benign: it is the source of the rests that make the notes intelligible. It enables the one Voice to make itself known. Once you hear that Voice, report what it says as accurately as you can, using all the skill at your disposal, and any tool that comes to hand. It is both an inner and an outer Voice, and thus requires that you listen accordingly in both directions. If you are making your living at this, forgive yourself. Realize that your livelihood comes not from selling a product that you make (even if your wages are counted by the sales of the mere packaging that the industry sells as "product"), but from your willingness to fill a role, for doing the job of listening in a culture in which such activity is terribly difficult, and in fact its discipline is denied altogether. Don't mistake yourself for the role, either. You are allowed to have more than one talent, and in fact as many talents as you can discover in yourself. Try to remain an amateur in the root sense of that word--one who does the activity for love. If you are not making a living at it, forgive yourself that, too. The day jobs of professional musicians (that is, telephone sales, time management, business activities, long-distance driving) are not that different from yours. There is nothing inherently positive about financial anxiety. I have known some professional songwriters whose visions have been crippled by that anxiety, and who lose hope that any audience might be capable of responding to a whole vision. I have known some professional musicians who view their jobs much in the way I used to feel about my factory job, and who, between being on call all the time and spending all their lives recording commercial jingles, lose their sense of wonder in music. Any active amateur is far more fortunate than such a professional. (c) 1994 Robert J. Franke Capsule Reviews in folk_music, 6/21/95 There have been a few CD's coming across my desk lately have been compelling enough to distract me from all the things I really should be doing, and lead me to share the news about them. The first is Rick Lee's new Waterbug release Natick (WBG0016). Rick Lee is living proof of the link between good songwriting and traditional music. Rick's love and deep knowledge of traditional music informs both his own songwriting and his choice of other contemporary songs. There's only one Rick Lee original on the disc (the title song) and one collaboration with Holly Gettings; "Natick" is the compelling story of a local history of one man's idealism set against his people's penchant for genocide, and "Strangers", the collaboration, explores the links between personal alienation, lack of community, and homelessness. Meanwhile, the strong imagery and /or storytelling value of other contemporary and traditional songs here are a veritable primer of what *works* in a song, whether traditional or contemporary, folk or country. Writers represented include Chuck Hall! , Andy and Lauren May, Jez Lowe, and Tommy Collins. There's lots of humor and lots of drama in this release, all connected with a sense of timelessness: musically there's everything from traditional banjo to spaced-out keyboard. Contact Waterbug Records for release information: Awaterbug@aol.com, or contact Rick at ricklee@netcom.com. Crow Johnson dropped off a copy of The Silverwolf Homeless Project (SWCD-1002). This anthology is a virtual Who's Who of folk music writers, including Crow herself, Bill Morrissey, Patty Larkin, Greg Brown, John McCutcheon, John Gorka, Cheryl Wheeler, Tom Prasada-Rao, Jon Ims, Ken Gaines, Tom Paxton, and Ani DiFranco. Lots of compelling storytelling going on here which we ignore at the peril of our souls. Silverwolf's address is RR1, Box 10, Thetford Center, VT 05075-9701. Finally, I've had the opportunity to listen to Ilene Weiss's Gadfly release Outside and Curious (G-111591). I haven't been as enthralled by a single-artist-alone-with-guitar release since Joni Mitchell's first, and Ilene's release has more humor and better guitar playing. Ilene's songs get covered by such folks as Anne Hills because they're beautiful and rich, but her own rendition of them serves them no less well. She's just about to come out with a new one, too--watch out for it. Gadfly is at P.O. Box 6603, New York, NY 10128 (212)996-7875. Ilene is at clamheart@aol.com. |
