hello all,
so, i’ve come to the conclusion that blogging is an insanely egotistical and strange thing to do.. it assumes that you have an audience (an arrogant assumption), and then it involves you faux journaling for that audience.. emailing on a one to one basis is just a new version of sending letters, but blogging isn’t really like anything that existed before it, except maybe intentionally leaving out your diary so someone else can read what you want them to. i guess the difference is that this is conciously public thing, so the people who are reading it don’t presume that they are breaching some level of privacy (see, even now, i’m just using big words so my mom will read this and feel, at least for a few moments, that my liberal arts education isn’t going to waste).
now that i think about it, songwriting at this point is kind of the same thing. the first time i wrote a song (“my pathetic love life,” on the patio of a hotel room in arizona while my parents were watching tv), i wasn’t writing for an audience (maybe i hoped that mandy, saori, and whitney would someday here the song).. in fact, for the first few years, songwriting was a spontaneous process that happened when i needed to discuss something with myself. i would pick up my guitar because i was happy or sad or confused or whatever, and then a song would start to form, and then i would finish it, and then i would put it away in my shoebox of songs to be dusted off at a later date.
but when we started playing out, things changed. just like blogging, songwriting is a public exercise. will you like my new song? will you think that the line about snow globes is cliche? i am ultimately accountable to you, my invisible audience. at this point, i am writing the song as much for you as i am for me. this is how i have felt for the last two years.
thankfully, i have broken out of that mode of thinking, at least a little bit. i’m working on some new songs (which, by the way, i think you’ll like), but, to me, at least, it feels like they have value and meaning detached from any sense of audience. which is cool.
all right, that was weirder and heavier than i intended, but i’ve written it for you, so enjoy.