Song sources: “Fallout Shelter”
Warning: There’s an explicit lyric. You have been warned.
This is part of a series I’m doing on the tracks on the new EP, Baltimericana. To read the other parts of this series, simply click on the tag “Song Sources” above.
Lyrics
To be honest, I don’t remember the writing process for this one too well. I think I started writing it after I noticed a sign for a fallout shelter one of the buildings near work that says the capacity is 1250, and it was almost certainly influenced by Josh Ritter’s “Temptation of Adam” (if you’ve never heard that one, it’s is lyrically perfect and one of the best songs I’ve ever heard). I do know that my wife had been playing Fallout 3 a lot around the time I wrote this, so that might have had something to do with it.
Baltimore still has a one o’clock whistle, which is an old air raid siren that’s played on Mondays at 1:00 in the afternoon. What little reading there is to do on the subject leads me to believe that this is in fact one of the many strange things about our city. Also, there are supposedly 112 of them. (Not a primary source, there, but there’s a picture of it.) I don’t remember hearing it in other places I lived, but the only other large city I’ve ever lived in was San Antonio, and I lived on the outskirts and worked in a windowless building, so who knows. Continue reading →
Song Sources: “Robin (The Mirror)”
This is part of a series I’m doing on the tracks on the new EP, Baltimericana. To read the other parts of this series, simply click on the tag “Song Sources” above.
This song came out of thinking about the cancellation of the U.S. shuttle program. If that sounds weird, then you don’t know me very well. Really it’s more complicated than just having given up on flying around in space. There are all sorts of implications, but the biggest one is probably “well, this planet is all we get after all, ever.” I have a general interest in space and astronomy, so I consciously know that the chance of terraforming Mars or reaching another star is remote in the extreme, but that doesn’t seem to help. People fight hopeless battles all the time, even knowing that they’re futile, but there’s a big difference between than and actual despair. So I pondered that a bit.
My wife was on vacation for the weekend at a conference, so I had the house to myself and got the song done in a couple days. Continue reading →
Song Sources – “(Can’t Swim in the) Harbor”
This is part of a series I’m doing on the tracks on the new EP, Baltimericana. To read the other parts of this series, simply click on the tag “Song Sources” above.
The song started with a riff that came to me while driving down Calvert Street one morning a few years ago. It got stuck in my head on repeat and eventually the words “Can’t swim in the harbor” came to mind. I think I had read a news story about how for all intents and purposes the Baltimore harbor might never support life during my lifetime due to the pollution levels that have been present for centuries. That or maybe I was just remembering the bilge water and floating trash caught in one of the little nets that run in the miniature canals that abut the streets in Fell’s Point. Sometimes I look at those and think that jumping into the water a mere five feet down is about as dangerous as jumping from the top of the Bromo-Seltzer tower.
I can actually remember the first time I noticed just how polluted the harbor was. I must have been about ten and was coming home with my parents from some function downtown. We were walking near where the Aquarium is and crossed over a small bridge; there was just tons of trash caught in a net there. Continue reading →
Faulker’s advice about ignoring inspiration
Slate had a cool series a while ago now called “Daily Rituals” about the habits that one should have to produce art, specifically writing. The 15th part is about ignoring inspiration.
William Faulkner: “I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.” George Balanchine: “My muse must come to me on union time.” Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” John Updike: “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.” George Gershwin said that if he waited for inspiration, he would compose at most three songs a year.
Great advice if you’re in a situation where producing art on a nearly constant basis will be meaningful. My question is: What good is writing 50 or 100 songs a year if you can’t reasonably work on more than 20 (notice that tag “work ethic”)? Or play more than 10 of those 20 live, or practice them all to figure out which ones are good? Or take advantage when you pull The One out of those 50 (because who cares if you write the Best Song Ever and only 5 people hear it)? This is just songs. I’m not even going to get into the implications for writing fiction.
Originally I was going to post about what a great idea Faulkner’s was for professional artists, but then I thought to myself: this is my blog, and I’m not a professional artist. Instead, I’m just going to point out a major difference between truly professional artists and … the rest of us, good or otherwise. That difference, I think, is that professional artists have the time, resources, and opportunities necessary to make writing constantly not a complete waste of time.
I do know that professionals also get roped into publication, release, and promotion schedules that overwhelm the ability to work on something and get it to the point of greatness. That’s a separate matter. I’m sure it has something to do with many people producing their best work early in their careers, even accounting for the two decades they had to write their first album or novel (versus a year or two for each successive).
I hope no one thinks this post is overly negative … maybe if there ARE some professional artists reading this, they will chime in with whether they are able to take advantage of “excess production.” This is, after all, just speculation on my part. The closest I’ve ever come to that is when I took a summer off after college to work on writing a novel, and spent 8-12 hours a day doing nothing but writing.
Recent Midway Fair songwriting and news posts
I thought some of the folks interested in songwriting might like the two most recent posts I wrote on the band’s (Midway Fair’s) blog, about writing new material or rewriting recent songs:
My first co-writing session with Jen.
Joe and I on turning our solo FAWM material into band songs.
jots on pants 