once more with feeling
in which we praise the value of repetition, praise the value of repetition, share how 30/30 is going, and April/May events
Hey Hartlist,
It is a truth universally acknowledged that 90% of success is showing up.
However, if you’re anything like me, you have a sneaky ‘loophole’ voice in your head that says Oh, yes, totally universally true… for other people. I myself am much more complicated.
If anyone is interested in joining me1 for the 30/30 - thirty songs/poems in thirty days in April - I’m posting for accountability over here. So far I have four little song sprouts, none of which I ‘felt like’ writing at all and none of which would exist had I not just, well, shown up.
Some Dates!
* SUN 4/24 at 4PMET - Livestream: THE CHRYSALIS #61, ADULTING - Subscribe and/or remind yourself here. (It’ll be on insta live also.)*TUE 4/26 6-9PMET - Live: I do another round of mini-Tarot readings in Brooklyn here.
*SAT & SUN 5/21 & 5/22 - Live: bring your kids!! to this delightful little puppet show I & my guitar are co-narrating! @ LaMaMa Kids on the LES
Here’s three things I love about the 30/30 so far.
Freedom. I’m going back ‘into’ my songwriting as if into a neglected sewing room and throwing swatches of fabric around, saying “hm that might work”. I’ve said before that “it doesn’t have to be ‘good’ it just has to be ‘done’” but it occurs to me that “done” can mean “action performed”, not “finished product”. I could also see a much looser approach to making songs with the band in the future, we’ll see.
Small Steps. While we’re slinging metaphors, it feels surprisingly painful in an almost-good way, like stretching a really stiff muscle. And we all know what happens when you think it’s cool to go from “ I haven’t moved this muscle in two weeks of sitting in jury duty” right to “enthusiastic crescent lunge in yoga class.”
Or… was that just me? 2
So yeah: only doing 20-minute sessions and coming up with fragments = AOK.
Permission to Repeat. As in, yep, there’s that same chord progression I’ve used a million times, there’s that same melodic hook or I just rhymed do/through/to yet again…
Ok I may not be cool about it while it’s happening; I still say all kinds of nice things to myself like “Can’t you do anything interesting anymore??” and “that’s it - you’re over” or “your old collaborator was right when he said you go to that note too much”.
But then I remembered how things have been ALL MY LIFE since I started writing songs. Time and again, weeks or even months of same-old same-old suddenly blossoms into Whoa that sounds different where did that come from? This has been true since I spent a blissfully unselfconscious 13th year banging out Am, G, and F on our piano until i had (probably) exhausted all possible song forms (sorry parents) and moved on.
Nobody was there to be like “um, you do that a lot? and maybe it’s time to try something new?”
But the truth is that the only time I’ve really gotten stuck in a rut was when I got self conscious about the repetition and stopped writing because I couldn’t “make myself change”. OR I tried to force a new sound “because our set has too many slow songs ” or something. The results were usually… not great.
I’m not saying it’s not useful to push yourself or try to shake things up. I’ve gotten inspired by listening to new kinds of music, or trying a new time signature, etc. Or doing a 30/30 instead of waiting to “feel like it”! !!
But I guess today I just wanted to stand up for the opposite. I’ve always been a Repeating Person. When I was a kid I ordered the same ice cream cone for years and read my favorite books multiple times and it would drive my mom crazy. “Don’t you want to try something new???” My dad would say “Leave her alone, she’s learning to write.” (About the books, not the ice cream. But no one was coming between me and my vanilla on wafer, rainbow sprinkles.) My 8-y/o niece now says proudly, “Aunt Rebecca and I are Readers… AND RE-Readers.”
Let me sing the praises of The Rut. There is value in it. It occurred to me that if I were bringing a run of similar songs into a class, I’d get well meaning feedback about how I needed to change it up or use a different chord here or there. And that wouldn’t be ‘wrong’… necessarily. And I’d try to do it. And maybe that would be good, OR maybe it would be a little forced and uninspired. And maybe it would be serving the entertainment of the ‘audience’ more than my artistic development. I don’t know. I’ve never taught. This is probably a hard call to make.
A rut might actually not be a ‘rut’ at all. It might be stewing process. You might be percolating, chewing over something you need to chew until it’s done in order to get to the next thing. Picasso had a Blue Period, right? Not a Blue Painting. Georgia O’Keeffe probably had someone say “that’s nice, but what about… Not flowers?” The writer Natalie Goldberg once said that unless she devotes a half-hour to writing about her Jewish family before diving into the novel at hand, everyone in her book, “even an Iowa farm wife, starts to sound like she’s about to make blintzes.”
It keeps coming back to this, doesn’t it- that the only actual ‘stuck’ place is resistance. Keep chewing the food and eventually you’ll metabolize. Stop chewing altogether and .. well that metaphor was probably going somewhere gross.
All righty. I have to go. Song 5 awaits, my new couch!! comes today, and I have TWO AUDITIONS to work on omg you guys spring has sprung and I’m still an actor and maybe the Chrysalis is opening. Slowly. One rainbow sprinkle at a time.
Love
RH
note that I said “joining me”; you can’t see any of the posts unless you register and do it also. I guess you could register and never write anything but as Andre the Giant once said that would not be sportsmanlike.
serious back injury that turns into sciactica and makes you unable to do curtain call like a normal actor because you can’t bend forward for several months. (Again.. just me?)