Cry me a River

Posted 12:12 PM by sean
I played the music I have written so far for Mac and E last night, and although I think they thought it was just fine, I was a little disturbed to hear a very distinctive voice in all the pieces. It’s nice for a concept album if all the songs sound vaguely familiar, but it is really trying on the ear to a theater patron to listen to the same goddam songs over and over.

Adding to this somewhat is that I am using similar sounds on my crappy Mac speakers to play the songs, so of course they will sound vastly more varied once I arrange it for a group of musicians. But I noticed that my music falls into one of two categories, either a sort of groove over which a tune exists, or a tune under which a chord progression exists. That may seem really stupid to say, but only one of the pieces I wrote stemmed from a complete musical idea; sounds, chords, melody and rhythm all articulated.

I find that the music I like best is the stuff where everything is purposeful. Early REM exists on many levels for me, the bass lines are melodic, the chord progressions are moody, the lyrics are… actually the lyrics don’t make any sense to me… but each of the pieces can be listened to time after time and they exist beyond the moodiness of the thing.

Plus, I don’t yet know if I have the same gift for lyrics that my mom has. There are some rhymes that I really like, and then some I am not sure I can get away with. I like the line ‘You breathe in my breath, my head starts to reel’, but later on in the song I use ‘Like Lady McBeth watching blood stains congeal’ to follow the same pattern, and even though it works, it just feels kind of white and proud of itself. Which in itself isn’t bad, Gershwin did it all the time (I’m bidin’ my time/ ‘cause that’s the kind of guy I’m), but he didn’t do it in songs that were heartbreakers.

I have such a love for those old torch songs. I don’t even care if they have any chance of translating, that is the music that moves me, as much as hip-hop or moody 80s music. In ‘Cry Me A River’ she sings;

"Remember? I remember all that you said./ Told me love was too plebian. Told me you were through with me, an’/ Now you say you love me,/ well, just to prove you do,/ Go on and cry me a river, cry me a river, I cried a river over you"

I will never write anything that wonderful, but I certainly can try.

That's it, really

Posted 10:15 PM by sean
I think in order to do something well, you have to practice it. I was taught early in my so called career that practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent, but I am starting to feel like that is a trick that educators use to make them feel important. The truth is, you can do it wrong twenty times, and that’s better than not doing it at all.

I wrote a musical when I was twenty or so, based on the life of King David. It opened with King Saul insane and raving and the child David comes in and sings and soothes his savage breast. Then everything else happened (including Bathsheba completely naked and a love affair with Jonathan, Saul’s son) and David tells God to go to hell and the play ends with David raving and insane and his son, Solomon, comes in and sings to him.

Clever, right?

I have written a lot of songs and screenplays and plays and even a novel which is about 600 pages long and nowhere near done. And these pieces follow a pattern that was only made clear to me for the first time today. Every time I feel the cycles start to spin and my life go out of control, I bury myself in a project over which I have complete control. People are shocked that anorexics think they are skinny, but it isn’t that, it’s control over something, anything.

A least this time it isn’t a shitty screenplay or novel. As I work my way through this, the music is starting to get good. And it is starting to come out easier, I am able to find what I want to do because the language is making more and more sense. I have started hearing music in my head, the way I hear the characters voices that I play, and…

I mean, yeah, it’s pathetic and I have built something that I have complete control over. But I feel terrible all the time except when I am writing music. So, what do I care. Sure, I could be doing more, but, I mean, I’m not, so I’m gonna do this. Better this than sitting in a pile of my own shit.

It also needs to be said that when you have a natural self destructive and cruel bent, there is a certain satisfaction in finding that inclination seen through to fruition. Nothing I can really do about the thrill of feeling hated, I wish it wasn’t there and I continue to do what I can to stop it, but, y’know, there it is, and I have to swim through it.

Posted 9:42 AM by sean

I wrote something yesterday that included a reference to a friend of mine who lives in North Carolina. It seemed to be saying something bad about both his life and his artistic pursuits. This is a man who has never said anything bad about me, and I feel like this needs to be addressed.

Jordana is a strange bird. She is lovely and talented and smart and demure and a thousand other things that people are attracted to, but when you spend a couple of weeks getting to know her, you start thinking she might be crazy. Her sense of humor is always two pegs removed from where you think the joke is going, her sense of the world has a strong moral center colored by these strange ideas of retribution and celebration. Her possibility for joy is incredible.

I have to be honest, my world is made up of people who get Jordana, and people who don't, and I draw a line between them. People who meet her and then seek her out, show me an ability to see past the madness to the greatness within. It's hard to do, particularly since so much of what we do as people is based on snap judgements.

There is another woman who is like Jordana in many ways. In an effort not to disclose names, I hope you're okay with me calling her CM. When I met her eight years ago, I sort of half fell in love with her and that has never left me. She and I were doing a show together, and I tried desperately to get her to date my friends, although one by one they didn't understand her or have the patience to make it work. And I started feeling like, either you get her or you don't, and the man who finally does will have to be a great man indeed.

And then this man, the director I mentioned yesterday, met her and fell in love completely. And I can't help myself, the fact that he asked her to marry him makes me feel endless affection for him. He got one of the beautiful strange creatures that most people just can't figure out. And I wrote something yesterday that could easily be misinterpreted as disrespectful to him.

Concerning the lifestyle, two days ago I asked Jordana, 'If you got the chance to move to a small town and run a theater company, would you do it?' and she answered, 'in a heartbeat.' What my two friends are building for themselves in North Carolina is the dream. If you live in New York, every time you leave and visit somewhere else, you are surprised by how much you want to stay and try this life there. To live in North Carolina and do theater... it just doesn't get any better than that. If I felt like I had already tried to get a national audience for my work, then I would leave and try this life somewhere like that. The only problem is the radar, and how low it doesn't go.

When you go through one of these periods of self-loathing, when you start shoveling shit on yourself, you sometimes get it on other people. I wish I hadn't done that, and I guess I will have to be careful about doing it in the future.