Wasting time.

I haven't blogged much because I went out of town last week and have been pretty busy in general. Also frustrated with the creative process. Although those are the times I guess I should be blogging. But this is my first time doing so, so I forget. I worked on a song...I had it all in my head. The lyrics finally started to take shape. I got the perfect drums for them. Everything clicked. Then I woke up....listened to my beats and played the song. And realized I thought it was shit. So I started over. Lots of wasted time there. I probably should have moved on. I guess I'm incapable of 'moving on' when something is bothering me like that though. I have a new version of my new song in the works though. Tomorrow I will see if I can't have a rough recorded. It is called "Out of Sunshine." At that point I will probably move onto the song "Out of Sunshine part II." Which incidentally has very little to do with part I. And I'm not smoking. Which means I've gained weight. Which means I'm pissed off, which means I'm tired from exercise and hungry from starving myself. How was your week?

So...the good part in all of this is that while I'm way behind on material...material is COMING. Like it really hasn't before. I can sit down and stare at half filled in stanzas on paper and words and rhymes and sentences, and cohesive thoughts don't seem to have as much trouble finding their way from my mind to the paper. This has always been the worst part of songwriting to me. I mean lyrics are weird y'know? Everyone gets something different out of music and I get that. But I have people that come to me and say "a song is only as good as its lyrics." I understand people feel that way. I just think they're wrong. The story of Pet Sounds is not told in the lyrics. He could be reading the ingredients to Cheeze Its and I'm pretty sure the emotional impact on me would be identical. I'm neither the musical master Mr. Wilson is nor the lyrical master Mr. Dylan is or any bizarre combo of those two from Pete Townsend to Tom Waits. But I DO have the goal to make my lyrics not embarrassingly bad enough to take away from being able to enjoy the song as a whole. I spend an awful lot of time making sure that doesn't happen and yet I still don't think of myself as a songwriter.

Am I? I write songs? I have no idea. Songwriters to me are people with these things to say that can't stay in their head that must find their way to the paper. Poets with burning souls. Or maybe (maybe not) more superficially, geniuses like Diane Warren or a host of Nashville penners that can knock back #1 hits in their sleep. I don't know what a songwriter is. And I don't know why I write songs and am convinced that whatever the answer is, I'm not one. Which becomes bizarre in thinking "what am I"? My guitar playing went to shit years ago. I was only told I had a decent voice by someone a couple of years ago so I'm still not completely comfortable there. My piano playing definitely won't win any awards. I can't properly mix a song with more than 3 instruments. But in the end, I somehow overcome odds and make music that I'm really proud of.

Is that weird?