Another Purpose

This blog lacks focus.
This blog lacks updates.
This blogger lacks follow-through(?)--initiative(?)--persistence(?)--commitment(?)...
This blogger lacks a thorough understanding of copyright and the means for attaining it.

Therefore
a new vein.

I've been doing a lot of songwriting.

Music was part of the family story but not part of family life. The guitar didn't see much action, disappeared in a robbery and wasn't missed. My grandfather and great grandfather were said to value music but no one ever played.
I grew up with a piano in the house. I have vague recollections of a piano being moved up the 72 steps to my childhood home. At some point that piano was replaced by a smaller one from my grandparents.
--
I wonder what happened to the old one--I never did understand what happened to it, only that my mother insisted that the replacement was better. Could it be that we sold the old one in hopes of shoring up our then shaky finances? I never liked the new one. It had an odd buzz in it and seemed small and unimpressive compared with the old one.
--
My sister took piano lessons sporadically. I picked out tunes for a couple songs by ear. My mother annually peeled back the cover and painfully plunked out Christmas carols, but the piano saw little action.
I took recorder lessons for a while, but never learned to read music. I never even learned to associate finger positions with note names, just relying on my ability to play by ear and memorize the playing patterns to avoid admitting my ignorance or struggling to learn something hard--a life pattern I'm working to change.
I took up the tin whistle and played joyfully and primitively (without instruction) but alway aspired to more.
I took a semester of piano lessons, facing my embarrassment at sounding stupid running scales and making mistakes in practice and at having skills contemporary to a pre-teen. Ultimately that embarrassment defeated me--I refused to perform at the recital and quit.
I sang a lot--in an internationally touring boy choir, in high school choirs, in college choir (till the high bass line of Beethoven's Ninth led me to quit in frustration). I took voice lessons, tired of being stuck in the chorus, determined to solo. I took music theory, but quit after scoring in the 40s on the first couple quizzes.
I worked at a theatre at the turn of the millennium where a colleague learned to play ukulele for a show. The uke made sense, like the tin whistle which had holes for the fingers where the fingers naturally fell. The six strings of the guitar made no sense to my four fingers.

Seven and a half years ago I went looking for a protest in response to our invasion of Iraq. Unable to find one I stumbled upon and into a music shop. The first thing I saw was a tiny banjo with four strings, a banjo-ukulele. I touched it and something in me responded to the sound. I couldn't stomach the $150 cost there and then but returned the next day to buy it and was playing songs in no time.
I'd written songs since my teens, a kind of heightened poetry with a strong tune. I wrote several songs while trying to live in NYC following college. I wrote songs driving to and from my first serious girlfriend's house. I wrote songs during grad school, inspired by a novel and with half an idea that they might form a musical theatre adaptation of that work. I wrote songs while teaching at a remote boarding school, and now I'm writing songs here in Sunhole.
Last Christmas, at my sister's request, I laid down a few tracks on the Mac app. Garageband and gave CDs of those tracks to family and a colleague whose taste in music was impeccable. The colleague's husband, a harmonica player, liked the songs and we started playing together. I hit a few open mics, built confidence. I keep writing songs.
So now I think I'll lay down some lyrics here. Maybe I'll mention some backstory.

One of the better and more popular numbers is something I call

Sprague Ave.

Standing on this railway platform
cold wind blowing down the track
Don't know where I'm going
hope I won't be back
Got to get around these wives,
husbands, children, little lives
are calling me
to join them
Calling me back now

And every little town I pass
looks exactly like the rest
Factories, broken backs,
a riverbank palimpsest
Every railside face I see
seems to say that same thing
they're calling me
to join them
Calling me back now

But a one-way ticket doesn't mean a thing
It's a two-tongued promise, no guarantee
Every step I take to leave
is another step
returning me again

Trust the good in everyone's
the hardest lesson I have learned
Best intentions come undone
cruel-hearted fools leave you burned
So many I have loved and hurt
for fear that they would hurt me first
but still they call
me to join them
Calling me back now

A one-way ticket doesn't mean a thing
It's a two-tongued promise, no guarantee
Every step I take to leave
is another step
returning me again

Can't you hear that bell a clanging?
Can't you see that flashing light?
Drifter's dreamride gently fading
in the arms of this good night
Got no reason left to rage
the curtain falls on my seventh age
Rhe light will die
and I will join them
Going back there now

A one-way ticket doesn't mean a thing
It's a two-tonged promise, no guarantee
Every step I take to leave
is another step
returning me again

written fall 2009