Writing and Music

There is just something that happens to me with music like this–acoustic and live, the way he spits out the meaning to the song vocally. It’s raining and gloomy today and I am in my element, writing and listening to this over and over. It started with an early morning walk in the rain listening to Radiohead’s National Anthem, and I ended up finding this when I got home. I am smitten. Guitar has always felt like some form of writing to me–if I could make my memoir a song, oh how amazing that would be to create. I was inspired by how acoustic guitar and memoir connect by a video I saw on Vimeo–a beautiful song played as a tribute to a friend who passed away. The song flowed like water, like the sea, like the stories of ourselves.

That Radiohead song is what got me thinking–because I love writing about music, to music, with music. I’ve written many poems and essays that include music and lyrics, like Beauty Walks a RAzor’s Edge (an essay about my best friend with severe arthritis set to Bob Dylan lyrics), Something Dark Like Jazz, She’s Come Undone, and oh there’s more somewhere.  Most all of my essays and memoir refers to music I grew up to, like The Oak Ridge Boys, Eddie Rabbitt, Deep Purple, Carly Simon, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, The Nitty Gritty Dirty Band, The Guess Who (Undun–and I saw them live and lost my damn mind at Rockfest).

Radiohead’s song “National Anthem” is truly art in my opinion. The backdrop, steady bass is the only sane part to all the chaotic jazz letting loose in the song, but eventually somehow that steady heavy bass becomes the insanity. It reminds me of how you feel like you are holding it together, and the very steady thing you tell yourself to make yourself feel right and true to yourself is actually a rhythm you dissociate in, like that bass, and your thoughts are that chaotic mass of jazz and trombone and sax. But then a moment hits you–you are walking in the rain downtown at five in the morning and you are suddenly just a bystander–a camera to the landscape, the feel, the smells, and your own solitaire body in the street. And that always brings a kind of calm, and then a bit of awareness. The bass I’d been guiding myself by for a little while was far more fucked up than the truth, and the truth is that I am a chaotic person–in an organized way-ahahahhah. Okay, let’s just say I am a late bloomer, I am 35 and only now figuring out who the hell I am and I am solid and confident. I know it’s a lifetime’s journey, but it’s nice to finally own myself. I am also awakening to parts of myself I never knew existed. I am also finally well enough to note my responses and behaviors and reactions and accord them to how I want to be and feel, and I adapt to what serves me. These are all big new things for me, so yes. The “healing” has been well on it’s way for a long time. Now I’m sort of… I wrote a sexy, dark poem the other day (Paramour, My Lover) for the Real Toads blog, and I am surprised first, by how quickly and naturally it came out. I wrote it seconds after I read the blog prompt, it’s the first draft, and I hit “publish” before I could think twice. And I am glad I did. My appetites are…peculiar, but in no way does my past cripple me sexually anymore. Nor fear. I am…hungry. There is something so freeing for me now that I am finally opened to what I’d always been afraid of–sexuality. And back to the Paramour poem, I am also surprised I am not ashamed or embarrassed to share it. It’s a part of me.

I have rambled long enough but it was nice. Take care everyone.