Living with One’s Work

What I really want to do is talk about The New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema album but I’m struggling to find the right words, so instead I’ll riff on some ideas I sketched out in a notebook in November 2004. It meanders a little, but rest assured, the original notebook entry is much worse.

I’m thinking of songs and what it takes to make them. Build. Construct. Deconstruct. Reconstruct. Restate. Edit. Polish. Rethink. Recite. Wash, rinse, repeat. The process is never done.

I was listening to the late Elliott Smith’s final album, and it feels incomplete to me. I wonder if he was ready for these tracks to be heard. Had he had enough of a chance to “live” these songs?

The importance of living with one’s work. Leonard Cohen would spend years on a single song, discarding dozens of perfectly good verses because they weren’t the right verses. Speaking of his song “Democracy,” Cohen says:

I’ve got about sixty [verses]. There are about three or four parallel songs in the material that I’ve got. (Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, p. 335)

He relates a similar experience with “Closing Time“:

So I went to work again. Then I filled another notebook from beginning to end with the lyric, or the attempts at the lyric, which eventually made it onto the album. (Zollo, p. 333)

And talking in general of craft:

The thing is that before I discard the verse, I have to write it…. I can’t discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines. You can’t discover that in the raw. (Zollo, p. 337)

The spin of a yarn, twist of a line, turn of a phrase, change of a chord, movement of melody, push of harmony and rhythm. These are the tools of a master craftsman.

One of the great things about playing in a cover band is that you learn a lot about songs. Not just the songs themselves but also how they are constructed and what makes them work. Armed with this knowledge, you create your own art, applying lessons of those who came before you.

You also participate in the ancient human tradition of passing what you know on to those who follow. You hear stories, you retell them in your own way. Then maybe one day, after you’ve lived some, you have your own stories to tell.

But they’d better be good ones because everyone knows and loves the old stories, and it is against those that yours will be measured. Live your work, and it will resonate — to borrow from the late George Harrison — within you and without you.

On this day…

• 2005: Ankle Tattoo Blues: Music — Started rehearsing ahead of schedule because I’m still in the irrationally enthusiastic part of the project and because I was [...]
• 2005: Microphone Setup — Took about an hour, a few choice words, and some help from my wife, but the $30 mic stand I [...]