Its the August bank holiday and I would like to say I am going to party it away doing holiday stuff. Alas not, there is work to be done but not before I sit at the back door in the sun and play a blues tune or two. I have come to that stage in my life where I am thinking, maybe I should write something different, behave like a grown up and get invited to readings and literary festivals. But there is something about writing a song that just buzzes. I have been doing some research for a book on songwriting and I came across something on Tom Waits. He said he had learned that after years of struggling with the creative
process, some songs require that you sneak up like stalking a
rare bird; some arrive fully formed, like a dream taken through a
straw; some are like bits of chewing gum you scrape off the bottom of a
chair and wad into a new form and some have to be bullied and cajoled and
given lots of tough love. I know what he means. Not too different from poetry you might say, except that you are trying to roll all of this around the music too. The lines that sneaked up on me this week are, 'the lights collide with the fairground ride...' which is a reasonable August bank holiday in Brighton, dancing on the pier, rhyme and it just came whizzing out of nowhere as I strummed some appropriate chords - lucky I was playing a guitar at the time, I guess, or I might have missed them dropping by. Its an old anecdote but Tom Waits tells about the day he finally took
control of his creative anxiety. While driving down a crowded freeway in
Los Angeles, he heard a melody in this head. No pen, no paper, no tape recorder, no way to capture this new brilliant thing, not yet a song just an idea paying a visit, he said, 'Excuse me. Can you not see
that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist then
remember I spend eight hours a day in the studio. You’re welcome to come
and visit me when I’m sitting at my piano. Otherwise, leave me alone
and go bother Leonard Cohen.' Maybe that's how it is, I get the scraps Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen, Steve Earle, Lucinda Jackson, Tom Waits et al miss while they are doing other things. As Nick Cave said, 'Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are
prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people
explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare
myself, generally things get done.' And there it is, just a commitment to write. I have three piles of paper on the floor of my study awaiting my attention - watch this space - in the meantime, a song at the back door before breakfast methinks. As I was boiling the kettle for the early grey tea earlier, I heard this piece of music on the radio and it took me back to the time I first heard it. I had just moved to London from Edinburgh and the world was already a different place. For some reason, it always reminds me of walking home, across Waterloo Bridge at Midnight; no words necessary:
