Growing up my father would sing and play
guitar to put me and my brother to sleep. Amidst the classic rock standards (The
Stones, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin) he also played a lot of his own material. My
dad’s a gifted musician and lyricist and to me, listening to him play as I
dropped off to sleep, there was never a drop in quality when he would switch back
and forth between McCartney to Lennon to himself to Robert Plant. Even now as
an adult I still believe that.
Dad’s songs had great melodies and lyrics
but an overwhelming majority of them were about heartache. Think ‘Angie’ by the
Rolling Stones, mix in ‘Yesterday’ and you’re getting close to the level of
angst my dad imbued his songs with. Remember, he wrote these songs as a teenage
boy, long before he fell in love with my mother, and as the saying goes he
wrote what he knew. One night after listening him sing one of his more
passionate songs about a woman who had cast him aside coldly and cruelly, I had
to ask:
“Jeez
dad, what did this girl do to you?”
“Oh,” he said with a shrug as he adjusted
his guitar strings. “I asked her out to a movie and she said no.”
He asked her out to a movie and she
said no. I might not have inherited my father’s musical skill but I think I
have got his ability to take a minor slight and mine it for the deepest reaches
of human emotion. For example, the other day there was a ten dollar charge on
my Visa card that should not have been there. I did everything I could to try
and take care of it, but in the end I had to just swallow the loss and write
off that ten bucks. Argh! Once I got off the phone with the bank, I started
writing. Time to put some characters in peril. After all, If I had to feel
vaguely uncomfortable, then my characters were really going to suffer,
damnit!
And it worked. I was having trouble with
that scene in particular, but once I amped up my character’s discomfort I felt
a lot of more present in the story. Before that there was no real anchor,
physically or mentally, to ground me. Once I saw my frustration as a tool
rather than an obstacle I was flying.
I’ve written stuff when I’ve been working
through grief or pain, when my fiction seemed pale and lifeless compared to the
real life going on around me. While writing can be a great way to work through
big things, it’s also fun to just take small, ultimately inconsequential
things- being turned down for a date, an unexpected charge on your credit card-
and use it to write a melodramatic EPIC love song/fantasy story.
That's a heck of a way to channel negative energy! As a musician, I can identify with where your dad's coming from. I wrote some songs about the silliest things when I was a kid. And yes--many of them were about girls.
ReplyDeleteI must say though, I've never really tried this with writing, at least not when it comes to minor annoyances. The next time I feel the urge to call someone a bonehead, I'll sit down and try to write something!
Teenage-y angsty songs - absolutely ... bad poetry of the non-rhyming variety - check ... some things are universal, and ageless.
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