Wednesday, August 17, 2011
It's frustrating when you suck at doing the thing you're supposed to be good at. I usually have high to nearly impossible standards for myself (okay, and others), and tend to never feel like I'm doing enough, or being good enough. And you know what? It's okay. It's just how I am. It has taken me nearly 3 decades to realize that I don't actually like downtime. I fantasize about it, and glorify all the lazy things I'm going to embrace with relaxed vigor, but I don't really enjoy it. As I've gotten older, it gotten worse. It's like the opposite of what's supposed to happen. You're supposed to work your ass off when you're younger, and then relax.
(insert tangent on how people live longer these days, but our timelines for supposed accomplishments stays within the same parameters (or gets shorter/younger) that it has for decades.)
I write songs. Or try to. I want to be really good at it, but I'm not always. People have different goals for their songwriting. Some do it to sell hit records. Some write songs to make people dance, cry, smoke weed, think, have sex, fight, etc.
I write because I want to tell a story in a beautiful and passionate way. It can be an angry story, with dissonance and ugly sounds, but I still want it to be beautiful in it's craft and the care that went into it.
I used to only write songs about my own personal experiences. I think I felt like it was "my thing" to be really personal in songs, and cagey in my personal life. It got boring. It was really easy to sit at the piano and write sprawling songs, trying to put loneliness into different perspectives and metaphors. But my favorite songwriters are story tellers (Tom Waits, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie), often turning history, fairy tales, and science fiction into everyday life. It's magic to be able to write a song about outer space and have people relate to it like they woke up and went there yesterday. In order to not write about myself, I needed a muse. I needed a direction. I needed a challenge. I turned to a book that I used to read as child called "Outside Over There".
Outside Over There was written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak and published in 1981. I was 2. My parents had just divorced and I lived with my mom at my grandmother's apartment in McLean, Va. I pretended the apartment building was a castle. A relative, or friend of the family, bought me the book. They didn't inscribe it. The synopsis of the book is essentially, the main character, Ida, has taken on the responsibilities to help care for her mom and sister while her father is away at sea. One day while she's supposed to be watching her sister, she gets distracted playing music and doesn't notice that goblins came in through the window, stole her sister, and replaced her with an ice changeling!
The rest of the book follows her journey into Outside Over There, trying to look for her sister.
For many reasons, the book resonated with me. Not only was it simultaneously beautiful, dark and scary, but it was also this imaginative story about this girl burdened with responsibility. I had it read to me every night until I memorized it, and then "read it" to myself every night.
While looking for inspiration for new songs not about me, I started to think about the book, and Ida. I started to wonder how Ida would have been as an adult after these heavy burdens were put on her as a child. As she risked her life for her sister. How would she be in relationships? How would she deal with death? What kind of job would she have? These sound like very basic questions for a book that is so colourful in story, but it sparked my interest. I wanted to see what I could create.
And so began my journey of "Foolish Ida". For the past few years I've been writing off and on for the project and am recording 2 EP's for it now. We have a good chunk of it done. The songs will be simple arrangements: piano, organs, layers of voice, an occasional string, and hopefully 2 or 3 songs with fuller orchestration. The recording process has been unexpectedly great and relaxed, and somehow went from this thing I did in my spare time to this thing I really really love.
On Wednesday August 24th, "Foolish Ida" is debuting at The Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, Ma. I've coerced Vesela Stoyanova (midi marimba) and Valerie Thompson (cello) from Goli to be my backup band. Molly Zenobia, Mary Bichner (Box Five), and Peter Moore (Count Zero) have signed on to be my backup singers. I feel very lucky.
There's only a Facebook page for Foolish Ida right now, but more will be coming soon.
(insert tangent on how people live longer these days, but our timelines for supposed accomplishments stays within the same parameters (or gets shorter/younger) that it has for decades.)
I write songs. Or try to. I want to be really good at it, but I'm not always. People have different goals for their songwriting. Some do it to sell hit records. Some write songs to make people dance, cry, smoke weed, think, have sex, fight, etc.
I write because I want to tell a story in a beautiful and passionate way. It can be an angry story, with dissonance and ugly sounds, but I still want it to be beautiful in it's craft and the care that went into it.
I used to only write songs about my own personal experiences. I think I felt like it was "my thing" to be really personal in songs, and cagey in my personal life. It got boring. It was really easy to sit at the piano and write sprawling songs, trying to put loneliness into different perspectives and metaphors. But my favorite songwriters are story tellers (Tom Waits, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie), often turning history, fairy tales, and science fiction into everyday life. It's magic to be able to write a song about outer space and have people relate to it like they woke up and went there yesterday. In order to not write about myself, I needed a muse. I needed a direction. I needed a challenge. I turned to a book that I used to read as child called "Outside Over There".
Outside Over There was written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak and published in 1981. I was 2. My parents had just divorced and I lived with my mom at my grandmother's apartment in McLean, Va. I pretended the apartment building was a castle. A relative, or friend of the family, bought me the book. They didn't inscribe it. The synopsis of the book is essentially, the main character, Ida, has taken on the responsibilities to help care for her mom and sister while her father is away at sea. One day while she's supposed to be watching her sister, she gets distracted playing music and doesn't notice that goblins came in through the window, stole her sister, and replaced her with an ice changeling!
The rest of the book follows her journey into Outside Over There, trying to look for her sister.
For many reasons, the book resonated with me. Not only was it simultaneously beautiful, dark and scary, but it was also this imaginative story about this girl burdened with responsibility. I had it read to me every night until I memorized it, and then "read it" to myself every night.
While looking for inspiration for new songs not about me, I started to think about the book, and Ida. I started to wonder how Ida would have been as an adult after these heavy burdens were put on her as a child. As she risked her life for her sister. How would she be in relationships? How would she deal with death? What kind of job would she have? These sound like very basic questions for a book that is so colourful in story, but it sparked my interest. I wanted to see what I could create.
And so began my journey of "Foolish Ida". For the past few years I've been writing off and on for the project and am recording 2 EP's for it now. We have a good chunk of it done. The songs will be simple arrangements: piano, organs, layers of voice, an occasional string, and hopefully 2 or 3 songs with fuller orchestration. The recording process has been unexpectedly great and relaxed, and somehow went from this thing I did in my spare time to this thing I really really love.
On Wednesday August 24th, "Foolish Ida" is debuting at The Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, Ma. I've coerced Vesela Stoyanova (midi marimba) and Valerie Thompson (cello) from Goli to be my backup band. Molly Zenobia, Mary Bichner (Box Five), and Peter Moore (Count Zero) have signed on to be my backup singers. I feel very lucky.
There's only a Facebook page for Foolish Ida right now, but more will be coming soon.
posted by Sarah RabDAU at
9:25 AM
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