johnmdemarco posted on August 04, 2010 19:11
I’ve learned, based on observing myself as well as others, that you never fully know what kind of art is bottled up inside of you. This week I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a fresh outpouring of song lyrics that I’ve needed to jot down in my journal at lightning speed, lest I miss a single word. My penmanship is so bad that I have to type them up afterwards so I can read them.
During most of the 1980s I wrote a lot of song lyrics, probably a couple of hundred all together. They were never recorded and barely seen by anyone else.
I recall that there were three “eras” of songwriting in my youth: junior high (also the season of most of the “novels” I wrote as a kid), the second half of high school and the first two years of college. Key musical influences for me in those days included my LP recordings of the Beatles, the Doors, U2 and Rush. Around my junior year of college, for whatever reason, the lyrical well dried up and I moved on to screenwriting and then journalism before my recent return to fiction manuscripts.
It’s interesting to begin to compare the songs of my youth with the lyrics I am jotting down on paper the last couple of days. The former were characterized by a longing for world peace, an anti-establishment bent, a questioning of why things needed to be the way they were. And a spiritual quest.
The new songs are no less non-conformist and mystically seeking in their themes, but there’s a key distinction when compared with what I wrote more than 20 years ago. I’ve lived a little. I’ve had real jobs, been to college and seminary, become a spouse and a parent, and lost loved ones to death. I’m a little less naïve, a little more concrete. As a youth I could only speculate about politics, corporate America, religious institutions, and love. Today, my words pour forth through the prism of both accolades and battle scars, informed by having read hundreds of books and interacted with a large variety of individuals across multiple contexts.
Yet, in many regards it’s the same songwriter. I’m still a child in many ways, crying out for things to make sense in what can be a senseless void of action and reaction, stretched across a relatively unconscious, institutionalized world undergirded by fear.
I don’t know yet what I’ll do with these songs, or how many there will be. I did have an epiphany late last night that I now live in Nashville, and surely that can’t be a bad thing…