Tag: 60

Project

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When my son Elihu was four months old I had a thought. Quite literally, it went like this: Omg, I can’t wait til this project is done. Kinda feels like it should be wrapping soon. The way I felt about my child was, internally, the same way I had felt about making a record. You write, arrange, record, and then it’s done. When I realized that my child was not a recording, I was flushed with an urgent sense of panic. Wait – what? When exactly was this ending? Wait – this was not a project! Holy crap! This was forever! This was an actual human that I was in charge of! I was deeply surprised at myself. How was it that I’d never thought this through? I was filled with fear of the most urgent kind.

(When I was in labor – at home in my bed – and my doula was trying to help me, she dangled a onesie in front of me as some sort of enticement to hang in there until the reward came. I remember thinking – what in hell is that for? Lady, that piece of laundry means nothing to me. Don’t distract me (what was I doing again and why?) and my god, please let’s get this thing over already.)

Clearly, I have never been much of a planner.

Now, twenty years later, thinking back on my panic at the realization that my infant son was a life-changer and dependent entirely upon me, I realize from a new perspective that the project has been satisfactorily concluded, and finally, the post-release tour has ended. The content is good, and it’ll have a long and robust shelf life. But the job is done, and I’m free to move on to other projects – smaller ones with less on the line. Things I can see begun and done without waiting two decades. It’s a good outcome, and I’m deeply grateful for the freedom to embark on new endeavors. Even so, it makes me wistful, living here in this empty house with the uncut grass waving all around it… But I’m too tired to become teary and nostalgic and wish it otherwise; I’m feeling my age and thinking to myself that I made it just under the wire.

Sometimes I cannot believe that I got us both through that passage. And I can tell you, it was a hell of a lot more work than making an album.

My energy has been drawn elsewhere the past few months, as evidenced by the longest-ever pause in between essays across the twelve-year history of The Hillhouse. It strikes me a bit incongruous that at a time when I’m not on the hook for driving a kid to and from school, when I don’t have to make meals every day or shuttle tubas and airplanes around – a time when I’m merely accountable to a handful of piano students – I find myself feeling short of the time I need to get my creative projects completed. When I was working and being a mother, I was still able to find the time to write essays, and yet now, somehow, I’m just not. Only so much time, only so much energy. I’m using both those commodities in other ways now.

It may surprise people to learn this, but I have never written songs before this year of my life. Took me sixty years to get around to it. I’m good at creating parts – good at arrangements and decision making, but I’ve never been the one doing the creating. I’ve always been a sideman. And now finding myself twenty years on the other side of my life’s main project, I’m learning that the whole world works differently than it used to. Plus I’m not young and cute. Yeah, that stuff has currency. Things really do change.

Songwriting is interesting to me; it serves primarily as therapy (why is it that the folks who really could use therapy the most are the least able to afford it?) and it also creates something which I began to feel a need for as I entered the open mic culture for the very first time: new material that hadn’t been done to death. You could say I began songwriting out of necessity. And now that I’ve started – I can’t stop. It’s crazy to me. I’ve become a prisoner to this process now. Ideas come to me in the middle of the night – usually my most productive time is from 5 am til 10 am – and I’ll sing them into my voice memo. Then the work then begins as I cull and piece together ideas. It becomes sort of like a puzzle. And until now, I’ve always hated puzzles. But this challenge is different – it demands resolution. But man, the content is often primitive, and I can’t help but be self-conscious about the quality. Some songs come together quite nicely, but most of them don’t. It was so much easier all these years to offer my opinion about content someone else had already slaved over. Oy. Who knew? Not me. Like I said, I’m not always good about thinking things through.

There’s a new adventure emerging now. I’ve already done a few solo shows and have a few more on the books. I’ll be participating in a local songwriters showcase soon at Caffe Lena, here in Saratoga, and that’s kind of a nice way to mark my first calendar year of writing songs. I’m realistic enough to know that I’m not an established artist, nor will I be at this point, and that in this culture I’d be hard pressed to carve out a living room tour even if I were, but it’s not a deterrent. In fact, it’s sort of freed me up not to worry too much about the outcome and instead enjoy these new experiences.

I admit to feeling a good deal of conflict about spending so much time on something that will never net a penny, but I’ll just have to sort that out myself (it is therapy, after all). I hadn’t seen it coming, but it’s here. Songwriting appears to be my new project. And I’m not even sure when it’s gonna end. But some things you just can’t plan.

And now for the diary portion of this post:

Elihu is doing exceedingly well, living and working (with a salary and not a word of English known by a single coworker) in Tianjin, China. He has traveled a lot – covering a country as large as the US, visiting different climates and navigating through a variety of regional languages and hard-to-understand accents. I am SO grateful for the blessed satellites which allow us to enjoy two-hour long conversations which cost us nothing. This is a far cry from the days when a mother saw her child off on a ship never to know of their whereabouts or well-being. I am deeply satisfied in Elihu’s personal successes. I am happy that he still feels me to be a friend, that we can cover such a wide range of subjects in our conversations, that we two can find the same things funny, the same things fascinating.

Showtime

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This is the final month of my fifties; one month from today I will turn 60.

Recently I’ve been feeling the sting of reality in a much fiercer way, and so I set about to express my thoughts differently than I ever had before. While not writing here for this dear blog, instead I’ve spent the past two months doing something entirely new to me: I have been writing songs. Just a month ago I would’ve been hard pressed to fill a set, now I have two generous sets of songs ready to go. Not all are keepers, but some, I believe, are pretty good.

Flushed with the excitement of creating songs that actually worked – songs that came from a genuine place of inspiration and most of which held together pretty well – I experienced a few moments of idealistic bliss, thinking that perhaps I should try to market these little gems. Some are quite formulaic, and they hit all the marks – with a little production could easily be imagined as the bed behind an introspective montage of some cookie-cutter Netflix drama… But that idea has been quickly dispensed with, at least for now, as the initial thrill has died down and the real world has imposed itself upon my starry-eyed visions. It’s ok. It certainly won’t stop me from writing. I have found that writing songs is a thrill and a challenge, it’s something I now love. And at this point in my life, I can draw from a deep well of experience.

A few posts ago I complained about the open mic scene in this town, and I’d hatched an idea to write songs in order to grab the attention of a lost and disconnected audience. The scene fairly infuriated me; the same songs that they played, the out of tune guitars and the warbling, pitchy vocals zapped me of my patience. More accurately all of this caused me to become infuriated with my own situation, as just a year ago this time it had seemed I’d had a foothold up and out of this place, but it was not to be. This past year I’ve been just sick that my prospects had vanished, and that I was left to languish in a town without any musical peers. The only solution, it seemed, was to write my own shit. So that’s what I did.

I’m not a fan of most disclaimers before a performance – but in this case I feel I must make it clear that by no means do I presume myself to be a poet. In some ways I suppose I’m creating a type of poetry that exists in tandem with music, but in that the words and music often arrive together, I don’t feel it’s the same. Nor do I think that my stuff is particularly enlightened or exceptional. But on the whole, I’m happy with these first exploratory months into this new mode of expression. It’s what makes me feel that this whole crappy detour of a year hasn’t been entirely for naught.

My health still has me in a near-constant state of despondency. I’m not far away from the heaviest weight of my life and due to ongoing troubles with my herniated discs, I just can’t move the way I used to. My mood continues to swing from the darkest downs to infrequent glimmers of hope and promise. The songwriting is another tool to help distract me from the day-to-day disappointments of what is my current life. But there is a small light driving me forward; I’ve been given several solo shows in which to perform my material, starting with a modest guest spot this weekend to a set as a featured artist at the local and iconic Caffe Lena. It’s definitely something. I don’t look forward to dealing with the panic attacks and mind games of anxiety that come with that attention, but the clock is ticking down now, and I don’t have time to fuck around. This seems a rare opportunity for a fresh start.

Turning 60 is much different than embarking on any decade that’s come before. It truly feels like it’s now or never. The stakes feel higher, the outcomes are so much dearer. In this life of mine I’m hoping for a few more moments of the connection and satisfaction that performing brings. And with any luck the journey will bring me into the sphere of good musicians once again, and before the final curtain there’ll be a few more shows to play.