Tag: songwriter

Under Over

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This past week I’ve been feeling off. Down, dark and scared of the other shoe dropping at any time. Some moments it’s really terrifying. So I try to soothe myself by eating with a vengeance, or drinking as much as as college boy. I stay busy. I keep myself distracted. I pass the days waiting for the nights, when I take my faithful Ambien and check out. But even then my dreams won’t let me be. My dream life is rich and busy, and most mornings I wake without a sense of having truly rested.

Something has felt different for me over these past few months. Something is nagging at me, and it’s been growing and growing. I’m trying to identify it. So many stressors. Hard to know what’s at the root of my ill ease. It’s a cocktail of many things I suppose.

If there’s any wisdom that I have gained from 62 years on this planet, it’s this: take your hunches – your instincts, your tiny afterthoughts, your conscience (my son and I have always called this the “God voice”), magnify it ten times – and then do what it tells you. Hear the message, heed the message. (Most of the time it’s been a really useful tool for life. I recommend it.)

My thoughts have been consumed lately by one nagging thought, but I can’t tell if it’s the neurosis of an aging woman or an insight from the ether. The voice keeps saying “You just need to outlive your mother”. My mother is ticking along at 90, with only a few short-term memory slips. On the whole, she’s very much who she’s always been. Me, I kinda feel like I’m waiting for some major health shit of my own to hit the fan. So many of my peers have suffered awful and unanticipated health crises; why not me too? I’m concerned; as the cotter pin holding that’s holding the whole Conant project together, I can’t leave until stuff gets sorted.

I’ve had a couple of strange feelings in my body, one being a persistent pain which travels around the upper left quadrant of my chest, sometimes under the breast, sometimes in the armpit, sometimes like a line up the left side of my neck. I’ve thoroughly employed my “God voice” technique here – asking for an assortment of tests over the past year, yet at this point my doc and I are basically giving up the search and are attributing it to a referred pain from a decades-old broken shoulder. But I’m not convinced. What to do? I think I’ve done all I can. Or have I?

I’ve been working on the physical crap inside my house for a while now with some good progress. Elihu’s big move to Brooklyn this summer gave a huge push to our household’s downsizing. He wanted to move out with all of his worldly possessions taking up just the space of two large rolling suitcases. And he did it, purging the rest. Inspired by his progress, I took up the charge and continued the project after he moved out. But still. So much stuff.

Just how is the garage always full after ten years of garage sales? The way in which we Westerners amass physical clutter is astounding.

My mother has begun to let go of the idea that I will eagerly inherit her house and its contents. There was a time, a few years ago, when she’d thought that naturally I would move into her house after she was gone. When I pointed out to her that I already had a house – and that I, as an aging empty-nester would have no need of a large, four bedroom home, she looked genuinely surprised. She’d just assumed I’d want all this stuff. It’s been a journey, but I think she’s finally coming to understand that her Baccarat wedding crystal and her well-worn Limoges china are of little value in today’s world. It’s sad. It is. But it’s the reality of this physical plane. Dust to dust. Only so many museums. Only so much room for our stuff.

As a creative, I naturally have notebooks upon notebooks (let’s not even consider the hundreds of cassette tapes of demos, rehearsals and ideas). Even though the reality is that I will not revisit and reanimate 99% of those ideas, I still wish to keep all of these for my lifetime as space allows. They’re only of interest – and comfort – to me. Once I am gone, into the fire they can go.

What I do wish gone is all the extra paper that I’ve hung onto. Programs, set lists, photos, ticket stubs, doodles, letters, diaries and so on. Things essentially only meaningful to my mother, my son and me. I so wish that I could indiscriminately grab piles and throw them onto the fire pit! But then I see a hand written letter from me to my parents when I was a child at camp, and I think “Oh! Elihu and his children will get such a kick out of this one day!” Myself, I find letters and notes of a personal and intimate nature of interest. But will my grandchildren find this ephemera fascinating or irrelevant? Will I even have grandchildren?

I admit it, I’m stuck. Taking a breather here. The burn pile will grow. I just need a minute.

The Studio is finally on the market after two years of town bureaucracy and lots of other back-and-forth legal nonsense. I emailed the architect to tell him the news, and it bounced back. A quick search informed me that he had died a year ago. He was an old family friend, so this was sad news. But it also seemed to confirm that things were truly in cosmic order. The time had come to let the place go.

My brother Andrew is another item on the unresolved list.

Just last night as my mother and I tried to discuss the topic, I saw that not only were we not any further along in the process of discussing his caretaking, but we had backslid. My mother and those of her generation have a hard time getting honest about personal things, and having a mentally unwell child is, in my mother’s eyes, a failure on her part and a point of shame. So how does she deal with this? Denial. Lack of willingness to see the problem. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t think you have one!

My brother is as hoarder whose house is something you’d have to see to truly understand. He cannot throw things out, whether mementos or garbage. There is no distinction to him. He is a deeply intelligent person, but he has been consumed by his disease for most of his life. He hasn’t had a job in over 40 years. Has no dentist, no doctor. He isn’t even in the system; his dysfunction is such that he cannot follow through on any administrative endeavor. One year I got him food stamps, but he never followed through to keep them. He lives with an enormous inguinal hernia hanging over his crotch. He’s an alcoholic and does nothing but sit in front of the TV at mom’s. She gives him pocket money (his only income). She gives him her car to drive. She makes him dinner every night, fretting aloud about what he will and won’t eat, and what she’s got planned. Some nights he goes on a bender and never shows. My mother waits it out with no idea if he’s alive or dead (Andrew won’t answer his phone). Many times through the years I’ve had to peek through the window panes into his shack to see if he’s ok. But if he saw me doing this, he might fly into a rage, so there’s some risk involved. My brother showers, eats and watches TV at her place, then retreats to a tiny, dilapidated farmhouse at the foot of the driveway. Dysfunction of the highest order.

At present, everything is propped up and working. Mom has a reason to live; she has been a consummate chef and feeder of people for her whole life. She has someone to check in on her, take out the garbage and collect the mail. Andrew has dinner, booze, entertainment and shelter. They enjoy a symbiotic relationship. No need to dismantle things. But one day, shit’s gonna fall. And inevitably, it’s gonna fall on me. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. But I’ll feel better once we finalize the will and get Andrew’s future care plan laid out. If mom won’t believe me that it’s a major concern, she’ll believe our family attorney. It’s on the immediate to-do list. Maybe my heart will lighten a little when we get our plans defined on paper. Maybe.

When I opened my eyes this morning, I turned on my phone and began the search for some dopamine to start my day.

Instead, I found a New Yorker article about a man my age of Jamaican descent who’d lived nearly his whole life here in this country and who had been deported by ICE to a maximum security prison in Eswatini. The agents employed needless violence.

The next story I read was authored by a mother who had lost her only two children. Both sons as teens committed suicide. They were deeply intelligent, insightful young men. But they were driven to such despair by either this world, their temperaments – or both – that they took their own lives.

Following in my feed came a post by a friend whose only child was killed a year and a half ago. She and I were both single mothers of only boys, both jazz singers, both from Chicago. I’d always felt a bond of some sort with her, and her loss has become a part of my life in some small way. I can’t help but feel a mixture of heartbreak and guilt when I think of her situation – and fear for the safety of my own son. But my reality is still comfortable. Hers is not.

This whole fucking world is brutal. And I am feeling it. I’ve got it good, I know I do, but I’m feeling the weight. The Trump era has ratcheted up the stress level on this planet for sure. It’s definitely playing a part in my unease. I long for freedom, peace and comfort for every last one of my fellow humans, but it seems further off now than ever before.

I’m under the spell of overwhelm.

Ambiverse

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Yesterday, my 88-year-old mother and a friend drove north into the Adirondacks. Essentially, it was a leaf-peeping trip, but along the way they visited the lakeside house where my father’s family had summered from the nineteen-aughts through the sixties. It was the house where I was conceived in August of 1962.

About a decade ago, I took mom and Elihu up to the Severance home. No one was in the main house, so I searched the grounds for the owners and found them having a large family gathering in a screened outbuilding. The owner happily gave us a relaxed tour of the house. He enjoyed the stories that mom recounted from more than a half-century ago. I enjoyed seeing the rooms and matching them up with my father’s stories. I spent a moment at the top of the stairs, imagining that young boy, long past his bedtime, sitting there listening to the eruptions of grownups’ laughter as they sat downstairs playing pinochle. But my biggest curiosity was to see the room. Easy enough, it was at the top of the stairs. A cozy bedroom under the gable that looked out and over that grand, descending lawn and the lake beyond.

When my mother and son and I stood in the room together, I felt the closure and completion I’d been after. My existence had begun in that room, and, as a result, Elihu’s life had begun there, too.

My son’s life had also begun in a lakeside retreat, one with a similar view (Torno, Italy). Like this place, the site of Elihu’s conception was also high above the nearby water, and on the south side of the lake. If you were to examine a map of each location, they look incredibly similar. My son and I both began our lives lakeside, looking out to the mountains beyond. This is something I very much like to know. Somehow, it grounds me.

A massive new house now sits too close to the driveway, and a few small outbuildings appear to be missing. The house itself has been painted, it is no longer pale yellow, and the shutters are now blue. The immense tree in the turnaround of the driveway has been taken down. It seems there has always been a tree there; it does make perfect sense. But new money doesn’t always abide by those classic rules of balance and aesthetics. No matter, it’s under the care of someone with resources. That’s the key to a building’s survival. The place may be changed in many ways, but it still exists. The phantoms of the home as it once was still hug the new periwinkle shutters and bare front yard. My father still lives there as a five-year-old boy bringing barn kittens into the house. The Confederate General and his family still live there, slightly dazed at their new Northern environs, but finding enjoyment in the cool waters and pine-scented woods, nonetheless.

These days I feel I am living in an in-between time. Things are this – and at the same time they are also that. My son is in college, closer to graduation than high school, yet he is close by, and I am able to see him fairly regularly. My mother, although visibly aging into frailty, is still living her own life, driving to the Adirondacks, regularly reading The New Yorker and feeding her outdoor wildlife friends each day. I myself look young enough to fool people about my age but am old enough to feel the oncoming infirmities. This and that. Both, at the same time.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or at least the next chapter to identify itself. Lest I sound as if I’m complaining, I wish to say that I am not. I am simply feeling a little off – a little out of my body, a little unsure as to what it is that I am. My roles have always been fairly tidily described. But now, these days? I’m kind of in a nether role. I’m not a caregiver anymore. Not for the kid, and as it stands right now, not yet for mom. I’m in a rare place, this I know. And so I’m filling the space. And filling it easily.

I’ve begun to write songs. And while it may seem a mere hobby – on paper it would satisfy that definition – it feels to be more than that. A tiny spark ignites inside my chest when I envision writing songs and performing them. And then, if I imagine a band behind me, it gets so exciting that I don’t dare explore it further. It would be too big a disappointment if I began to care too much about that particular outcome, never to see it happen. But then again, why the hell shouldn’t I dream? Is that not what leads to creation? Have I not played behind dozens of other people who themselves had the conviction of self to assemble a band in support of their own vision?

It appears to be time for me to step up. And I am in the process of doing so. Step by step I am beginning to ascend. Or, as a band leader once put it to me, I am, to use his words, beginning to “ramp up”.

About a year and a half ago I had a rapturous musical experience which was followed quickly by an excruciatingly difficult period. I lost almost half of my hair due to the stress that it caused. I stopped working out. I started eating and drinking way too much. Then I suffered a back injury. After six months of brutal despair, I knew only I could get myself to a better place. And so I began to work my way up in the only way I saw available to me. I began attending open mics in search of a new musical tribe.

The open mics were challenging to endure, especially in the beginning. Long slogs through dozens of bad musicians playing done-to-death songs on out-of-tune guitars. Yet I tenaciously continued to attend open mics everywhere – even in Chicago – fascinated by the hard and earnest work that so many people were putting into their performances, even if, at the end of the day, they were far from performance-ready. I also went to the open mics on the hunt for the gems – the sleepers, those magic songwriters who stop by to work out a new idea, or who are there to fill a night because they’re passing through town… (That’s a bit of a fairytale outcome I now realize – although at the Caffe Lena open mic I actually have heard and become acquainted with a few “real” artists.) On the whole, there were no sleepers. The “real” musicians and songwriters were out playing real shows.

Tiring though they may be, the open mics have been a very important step in my ascent. They give me an opportunity to test this new skill of songwriting. They provide me with a goal. They provide me with feedback and input. They have opened doors for me to do my first solo shows. They have been a necessary step on the staircase ahead of me. They are a great tool, to be sure.

The first song I wrote was born of sheer need. I was going mad. Bereft and alone, without son, prospects or piano students, I pulled my keyboard outside into the sunshine on a late summer day because I had nothing to lose and no reason not to. Moved by the dire situations of two dear friends, I began an aural contemplation on the whys of it all. And by the end of the day, I’d written my first song.

It feels a bit naïve to actually call myself a songwriter at this point in my evolution – I only have about 30 songs completed and ready to perform – but I feel as if it’s a really perfect tool of expression for all the interior stuff that’s going on in my head right now, and it tugs at me daily. And at this time in my life, when I am not distinctly in my middle-aged years nor yet in my truly aged years, it seems to be a sweet spot for this new adventure to take place. I can still carry and setup my gear, I’m able to offer enough interesting covers to fill some single jobs, and I can perform a few sets of well-written original songs decorated with plenty of charming backstories.

Panic attacks still tap me on the shoulder and threaten to reappear, but I’m working on it. Silencing the self-sabotaging monkey which pulls me out of that place where I need to be in order to perform well should be handled by now, but it is not. I’m working on it. It is getting better. And I also gotta slow the fuck down when I talk. These things I know, and I practice every chance I get. I’m deeply appreciative of all the time I have to write and all of the opportunities I have to perform – and to work on telling that monkey who’s boss. I’m trying my very best to ramp it up.

I’m no longer at the bottom (although I’m not even sure if I know where the top is). What I do know is that I’m somewhere in the middle of it all right now. I’m en route.

And even though I’m not “there” yet (and I do fully realize that “there” may well simply be right here and now), for the sake of naming things in a physical world where we organize our lives through time and accomplishments, let’s just say that I am definitely on my way to a new place.

For now, I reside in the ambiverse.

To my friends near and far, you can watch my upcoming solo set at Caffe Lena (here in Saratoga Springs, New York) through their live stream. The show is on Sunday, October 29th at 7 pm. I’m up first, so tune in close to 7 EST for my set. Link here.

You can read a sampling of my song lyrics here.

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.