I fashion myself as a prose writer on this blog, but there's another type of writing that comes much more naturally to me.
I've been a songwriter since I was maybe 6 years old not really because of some deep artistic drive or secret career ambition but because that's just the way my brain has always processed feelings. Song ideas always came out, and so I always wrote them down, and that's about as simple as I can put it. I never really saw it as some grand romantic idea. If you love food, you'll probably get pretty good in the kitchen and start making up your own recipes. So I always found it pretty natural that if I love music, I'd probably learn to play an instrument pretty well and write my own songs.
Now that I'm older, I think more about the craft of songwriting and what makes a great piece of music and what exactly is the value of creating art. But for most of my life, all I really cared about when writing a song was recording how I was feeling at the time. Storing that emotion away in a mason jar made of three verses and a chorus. Often that was just the practical thing to write about; I wasn't much of a fantastical thinker, so the easiest muse for me was whatever was happening in my life at that exact moment. But it was also often a very therapeutic exercise. A lot of the most personal songs I've ever written — Father's Day and When Eliza Came to Play, for example — came from moments where I was feeling a bit emotionally overwhelmed, and grabbing my guitar and writing something that captured exactly what I was feeling flushed out my system and made me feel a lot better.
One side effect of this is that once an emotion like that gets captured in a song, it becomes immortal. I'm not sure there's anything else that is able to resurface emotions as potently as original music. If I play a song I wrote back when I got rejected by a girl in college, for three minutes, I've relapsed again into that exact same mental state. And in some ways, I'm sure that sounds terrifying. The idea of having some of the most painful experiences of your life immortalized sounds like a horrible idea.
But in practice, I've actually found it very comforting and reassuring. Because that also means whenever I'm approaching an emotional cliff of any sort, I've got an ever-growing record of all the past times I've felt that same emotion, captured in visceral detail. It gives me a chance to slip back into all of those moments and remember that no matter what I'm feeling on any day, I've felt it before, and I'll probably feel it again. And it won't last forever. And nothing is as good as it seems. And nothing is as bad as it seems.
And acknowledging all of that is like being handed a license to feel whatever extremes come my way knowing things will be alright in the end.
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