it's time to light the lights
in which it's the winter solstice and you get a little comedy and a little in memoriam
Hey Hartlist,
This week I learned that it’s much easier to clean a menorah if you just pour hot water into it and wait a few minutes. Also, did you know that male reindeer lose their antlers in winter, so Santa’s sleigh is actually pulled by a team of women (reindeer)?
On a related note:
What a great show, you guys. In an annual twist that seems to surprise no one but me, the Winter Solstice show at Rockwood Stage II on Wednesday was great! Firstly: you all showed up! (This is why I shouldn’t do my own PR.) From our post-gig conversation, my three takeaways are: 1) its time for us to record again already 2) this gig is a “holiday tradition” for some of you (!) 3) you really know your Billy Joel, or at least kudos to the guy who shouted “Downeaster Alexa” as soon as I started to introduce our “mystery” cover.
Secondly, we did a new song!! As in, I wrote one! After many months of… not writing, even after trying a “30 songs in 30 days” challenge which yielded nothing I thought of as a viable specimen. And then I gave up on it, and then this month I wrote “William You Ought To Know” and foisted (forced) it upon the Wrong Band with a large dose of incoherent enthusiasm, the making of a coherent chord chart (!) and lies like “we don’t have to do it at the show, let’s just try it” in rehearsal.
I’ve said before that I always know a song is working if it feels just a bit like it isn’t coming from me. I also think I know a new song is really worth pursuing if it feels like a left turn, a new room in the house, not like anything I’ve done lately. ‘William’ is upbeat ( I KNOW), catchy, and dare I say danceable? Guys, I said after the run-through, I actually can’t believe I wrote this. I can’t wait to play it again. And when I do, I will dedicate it to a former band member who complained that we “never play anything fast”. You know what doesn’t work? Spending two years trying to write “something upbeat”. You know what works? Well, not that.
Lastly, on a a less upbeat note, I found out on the way to the gig that Sarah Schlesinger, head of the wonderful, changed-my-life-personally Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU, had passed away. I attended the program in 2017/18 along with other WB members and it was a big deal for me, speaking of the feeling of finding a new room in your house. Sarah encouraged me to attend as a “words person” when I thought I had no stories in me and couldn’t write dialogue, placed me with my collaborator Jacinth Greywoode, and stewarded “Iron John” into being as our thesis advisor. She made me feel believed-in, and I learned that that feeling incites more creative output, risk-taking, and joyful discovery than really anything else.
At the concert on Wednesday, we did the song ‘Stars’ from my album The Magician’s Daughter. It doesn’t always work live and I was going to cut it, but I’m glad I didn’t . I dedicated it to both Sarah and to Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, who passed on November 30 this year. I think that works. As far as I know either of them - which admittedly isn’t far - they were both quietly tenacious, passionate, prolific artists who made a lot of things happen while not particularly caring whether they were in the spotlight all the time.
It occurs to me now that ‘Stars’ came out of my first 30-in-30 challenge in 2015, before I even knew I was going to record. I actually got several ‘viable’ songs out of that - The Kestrel Strand, Waltz Home, Run for the Road - which we still play. But “Stars” was a little odd fragment I considered “non-viable” and left alone. Then, on a cold January day in 2016, I was in Ben Sollee’s studio working on the album, and we heard about David Bowie’s death. Ben pushed an ipad with an electronica app open in front of me, and suggested I try to write something about it while he went to pick up his kid. He paused in the doorway and said “Stars? Starman… going back to the stars? Something like that?” and then left. And I suddenly remembered my little non-viable song fragment of the year before.
A song has its moment, its place in the Story, where nothing else will do.
You learn to know when that moment is. Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes you have good teachers.
happy solstice,
Rebecca