One interesting (at least to me) chapter in the, "Josh Attempts to Make Sense of the World by Spending an Inordinate Amount of Time Making Art That Very Few People are Interested in" experiment has been the year I spent writing, recording, and posting a Song a Week to my YouTube Channeland my Bandcamp.
There, at least, the reasons for my commercial failure were obvious:
I was inconsistent in theme, tone, subject matter, and execution; and (more importantly)...
Although I'm a decent songwriter, today's highly competitive Arts Market demands rocket-surgery-level execution. Which, at least musically, I most definitely do not got.
Still, the experiment did provide a prolonged picture-window into the way my mind, in particular, makes sense of the world and I thought, might as well make some kinda use outta all that work—take a closer look at that crazy year, and maybe a clearer picture of myself and the world will appear.
So hi-ho, hi-ho, it's FOURTEEN THOUSAND words worth of navel-gazing we will go...
I kicked off the year with a smarmy jab at the way people treat the Christian religion (and Jesus in particular) as a Gimme Machine.
I put Jesus in my pocket / took him to the store. / Jesus bought me what I what I wanted, / but I just kept wanting more...
I notice I wrote it in the first person, which may have been intended to soften the blow of the critique, and to take responsibility for any complicity I might share for the abuses of the religion I grew up in.
That may have been disingenuous, since I'm a rabid anti-materialist and I don't think I ever really asked Jesus for anything pocket-Jesus-y. Mostly I was just super duper pissed off at the way the contemporary USAmerican evangelical "Christian" church has whored itself to Babylon for a roll between the sheets with political power, with the whole song leading up to what I felt is one of the key questions of our time:
I can hear those thirty pieces / jangling down in there with you / Pocket Jesus, is there room / or will I have to now get rid of you?
There's a reference there to Judas selling Jesus out to the Empire for cash, and also a vague echo of that Grand Inquisitor thing in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, where Jesus comes back to Earth and they put him on trial and kill him all over again for refusing to get with the program.
With the current evangelical "Christian" war on empathy, the poor, the immigrant, the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned, the marginalized of all kinds, and the widow and orphan (which is to say: the folks Jesus most identified with)... I think I can say with near-certainty what this country would (once again) do to the historical Jesus, if he happened to be foolish enough to show his face in this cruel and hateful country of ours.
Back in the winter of 2020/2021, the loonies were regularly firing off machine guns in the woods around my home. This was before their attempted coup friendly little love fest at the capitol hadn't achieved its desired effect of overthrowing an election and murdering the momentarily compunctioning soon-to-be-ex-Vice-President, and generally proving that two plus two equals five making America safe for racism and misogyny Tesla.
Having grown up listening to machine gun fire and explosions in terrorism-plagued 1980s Peru, I understood that Civil War violence is a real thing that can and that I am not immune to it.
So I wrote a song in which "the devil's black balloon" is a metaphor for the tensions that have strained this country to a bursting point.
Politicians lyin’ from the North and West and East / You could burn the whole thing down, I wouldn’t mind it in the least / But they are not the ones who’ll pay in the judgment comin' soon / I can see it risin’ higher like the devil’s black balloon.
I practiced. I recorded.
I posted it online, somehow, a mere two days after the aforementioned, um, thing at the Capitol.
The suffering and deaths of millions of people compounded by a propaganda campaign insisting that none of it existed, while simultaneously pushing conspiracy origin theories and quackadoodle cures.
That was awful, of course.
But for me, on a day to day basis, it was more about the "stuckness" of it. The repetitiveness, and the loss of a good number of the things that had been bringing me joy: a film premiere at a prestigious film festival... canceled. The open-mic performances I had begun to love... canceled.
Yet this song ends with a note of hope, and a settling into the reassurance of love of my wife:
I stop to breathe, / remembering that freedom lives inside of me. / I know it’s true / that one thing that’s the same is all the love I feel from you.
Things may not change / but that just means that what we have always will remain. / Your love knows my name. / Our love will remain.
This one was ostensibly written by a character in a film script I'd been working on, for another character in the film script - his alcoholic wife.
It talks about how she always hides her pain from him (Jane does all her cryin' standin' in the rain) and how helpless he feels in the face of that suffering. The only solution, he concludes, is to just be with her in her suffering.
Never been enough of life that I could give to her, he sings. But I could step out into the rain.
I suppose this song could be seen as an interesting example of how art forms can bleed into each other.
But I think the argument could also be made that it's a case of projection.
Jane is me, suffering from depression and feeling guilty about that. Knowing the pain that it causes the ones who've loved me most, and who suffer in their inability to heal me. It's a plea, I suppose, for them to do what Jane's husband does.
There was a lot of garbage that came with growing up on what was essentially the Dharma Initiative from LOST, but day to day life on a missionary base in the Amazon of Perú, South America was fairly idyllic.
Sometimes I miss it, so I wrote this song.
Yearning for more pleasant times, perhaps, after the previous week's tale of woe?
Perhaps.
It's not all nostalgia, though. There's grief at the loss of that childhood home, and I take pains to acknowledge it... while nonetheless ending on a positive note.
What if tears are just a grateful heart that’s breaking through? I ask. A way to take a part of what you had along with you?
This one really resonated with a lot of the other former missionary kids that I know, and two of them (who I'd been jamming and open mic-ing with before covid) eventually convinced me to include it in the songs we laid down a year or so ago at a buddy's studio. That's the version I've linked and embedded above, since it's musically tighter than my original solo recording, has a bunch of visuals from my actual childhood home, and is improved by the work of my much more musically experienced friends.
Remember when the internet went crazy for murmurations? The power and coordination of a thousand birds moving and swirling together as one. Individuals fusing into an entity that appears as its own organic creature.
My wife and I have encountered a few of these murmurations at her family farm, and I wrote a song drawing a comparison between the birds and ourselves as a couple. It's a simple little love song, but with a melancholy tone I'd be hard pressed to exactly locate in the lyrics or melody.
I don't know why I seemed to be wired for sadness, but I am.
While at first glance Nobody Has to Love You may seem to be about the importance of opening yourself up to committed, long term love, I think it's imbued with a recognition of a less romantic aspect of long-term relationships: that we all have moments where we hold our partner at arm's length. We take them for granted. We wonder if our lives could've been different with someone else.
There will always be another just around the bend. / But if you chase perfection that’s never gonna end.
Every little daydream’s just a path you didn’t take. / Don’t spend your life on dreamin... that’s just love that you can’t make.
Just as a rule of thumb: if you see someone publicly admonishing other people about something, it's partly a confession.
I'm okay with admitting that, because I don't think what any of us really needs is another guru with "the answers." Rather, we need communities made up of people guided by humility and vulnerability, who'll support us through the endless mistakes that'll comprise our education.
As a related side note, a number of the comments on this video come from people I found in the "Song-a-Week" subReddit—a community of people who'd listen to each other's songs and offer advice when asked, but mostly were just there to be encouraging.
I made real friends in that group, and even ended up collaborating on two of my songs with William Ax, a gifted Irish/Brazilian living in Portugal.
Nobody has to love you.
Nobody has to give dozens of hours to help you bring a song (or two!) to life.
I know it takes some of the shine off to admit this, but I actually began working on the once-a-week songwriting process in November of the year before I started posting.
I did this for two reasons:
First, because I knew I'd get really freakin' anxious trying to write, record, and post a song a week—and anxiety is a bad place to be when you're trying to make things.
And second, because it gave me the opportunity to pre-send rough recordings the songs to an email list of legit musicians I happened to know. "Just to check them out," I said, while secretly hoping to seduce them into helping me make my songs a wee bit less sucky.
My my musician/screenwriting/visual artist pal Chris Gervais was the first to fall into my trap, helping me to completely revamp A Man Without a Name. He started with my melody and chords, and built it into a full-on SONG that was both mine, but also very much his.
Which isn't easy.
Collaboration in the arts means letting go of something that's precious to you so that something fuller and richer can emerge. I'm embarrassed to admit that it wasn't until super recently that I looked back at this song and began to appreciate the monumental amount of work that Chris gifted to me as he crafted it, and the layered gorgeousness of what he came up with.
I'm just gonna go ahead and embed it here, because this one got way less attention than it deserved.
The song itself is me getting back to more of my protesting, angry roots—yelling at... oh, right. At myself.
It starts by describing an encounter with a person who's panhandling but who used to be wealthy, and yells at the narrator (Me!) for walking by without even bothering to learn his name. It expresses shame for that, and points out that the man is a mirror, and that he and I are the same.
From there it describes a wealthy and successful man on the television whose name I also do not know. To me, it suggests, he's just like the un-housed guy on the street. A full-on person, held at arms length by willful ignorance.
Lastly, it talks about an intimate relationship in which I keep a woman at arm's length, despite her attempts to love me. The reason for this (I am kind of embarrassed to admit) is that I don't really even know my own name. Which is to say that I am disconnected from myself, and my lack of self-knowledge is the thing that is preventing me from experiencing intimacy.
Which, um... yeah.
I know you're probably not still reading any of this, on account of the insane length of this post... but if you are, I doubt you expected this to get quite so self-revelatory, in quite such a non-flattering way.
But look, this is what art has to be, if you want it to be real and useful.
This is why so much art/music/whatever straight up SUCKS, regardless of the level of acclaim and financial remuneration the artist/musician/whatever receives because of it.
I might go my whole life as an "unsuccessful," flailing artist, but I'm starting to think (as I re-examine these songs) that I do have something to be proud of: that at one time or another, I have done the crucial and painful work of opening my veins into the work. Bleeding out into it.
I had the guts to expose my real self to other people.
Maybe I'll never learn to be this open and vulnerable where it actually counts—in my real-life relationships—but my willingness to tell the Truth about myself in my art isn't nothing. Just because I'm kinda/sorta hiding behind the plausible deniability of "It's just a piece of Art, Man," that doesn't mean there isn't value to it. That doesn't mean you can't benefit from my willingness to allow my vulnerable inner self leak through.
I owe a massive debt on this one to the acclaimed poet (and sometimes violinist) Tania Runyan, for what she brought with her strings.
Also (more invisibly) to my friend Joe Miller. Joe and I met when he did the scoring, soundtrack, and sound design for my first feature film, and he was an early encourager of my songwriting. I don't believe in geniuses, but if I did, Joe would definitely be in that category. Joe mixed and mastered All Good Things for me as a special favor, cuz he's a special guy (everybody say "Awwwww").
The song is a lament for a friend who'd died a few months before, unexpectedly.
All good things must end. But it’s too soon, my friend. / They say to let you go. But I think I’ll just take that slow.
What interests me most about this song is that it expresses sincere ignorance about what had/would happen to my friend. There's a yearning for something more, sure, but without the certainty that I was taught to claim for the afterlife.
Where did you go when you went away? The song asks. They all claim to know, but I'm afraid.
And the reason this interests me so much is less that it was societally/relationally risky for me to publicly admit that I felt that way (posting it in places where both his family and our shared, primarily Christian friend-group could see), and more their actually response, which was overwhelmingly positive and grateful.
I mean, I received phone calls.
So I have to ask... was it pity? Were these people sorry for me, in my doubt and uncertainty?
Were they just being sensitive to my own particular way of grieving?
Was the gratitude they expressed to me for having written the song more just a deflection from what they were really thinking—something along the lines of, "Wow, that Barkey's really slidden into sin and iniquity... we should be nice to him!"
Because, yeah.
The song wasn't exactly reassuring.
Yet people seemed to feel reassured.
My suspicion, fellow bumbling travelers, is that they were at the time wrestling with their own doubts and uncertainties. That for a moment, the brutally abrupt loss of this friend (and family member) was pushing them into an uncomfortable place of epistomological uncertainty, and the clear articulation in my song was like a release valve.
I doubt I'll ever know the answer to that question... my assumption is that if the answer was the latter, then as the years have passed they've managed to re-form a crust of certainty around life's most unanswerable question.
But I do like to tell myself that one way or another, that song mattered to some people.
A saintly treeplanting friend of mine used to loudly proclaim that Jesus was "the Great Shit Disturber."
So perhaps it was my admiration of these two men (Jesus and my treeplanting friend) that led me to follow the sincerity of "All Good Things" not with something equally contemplative, but instead a rather pointed exploration of the hypocrisy of the USAmerican evangelical church.
I started with a bit of a talk-sing:
Listen up now, babies, I’ve got something I gotta say, bout America, the place where I am livin now, today. / There’s a belt, they say, of Bibles, with a church on every street. And a little cross around the neck of everyone you meet.
Where everybody always knows exactly what God meant, when he sent the holy scriptures of his holy testament. / And they’re dyin now to tell you—oh, they’re dyin just to say, exactly what this means for how you ought to live today. / But I gotta say, I have my doubts, I’m not sure that it’s true, that any fool American knows what our Lord would do.
I then went on to suggest that if Jesus was here he'd maybe destroy all the guns, redistribute all the wealth, and hand out marijuana brownies to everyone. And if that wasn't enough, I added that the idolization of Trump (who I referred to as a "festering pustule") would probably piss the Good Carpenter right the heck off.
If there had been anything at all calculated about my meandering Year of Songs, I would've followed up "All Good Things" with something equally contemplative. But in addition to having a ping-ponging brain, I'm also an admirer and occasionally active follower of the teachings of Jesus. So in response to their enthusiasm for my fearful-but-hopeful song about death, I pivoted to an admittedly somewhat sarcastic rebuke of what I saw as their hypocrisies.
Not exactly the best way to build a YouTube following.
Of course, the alternate explanation for the viewership nosedive from the previous week to this is that the song was just not as good. Which is very possible.
We'll leave that to my many, many biographers to decide.
Of course, I'm as vulnerable as the next Songaweek Songwriter to the fear that I've crossed a line and been a bit too honest (or unkind) in how I've expressed my opinion. So the next one was, I claimed, an experiment in psychedelic songwriting (but without the drugs).
Which is to say that I just wrote down whatever the heck I felt like writing in the spirit of the moment, and didn't try to say anything.
Stuff sneaked in, of course—for example, a line about American consumerism (The fox is in the henhouse, but we're online shopping... and the bill's about to come due); and the choral sentiment that Everything that you feel is real, which could be taken as an insistence on the value of all of human experience.
That's certainly not how I was raised, after all, so perhaps my unconscious mind was persisting in its stubborn habit of pushing back against any and all received "knowledge."
This is the first of the aforementioned collaborations with Mister William Ax, who resonated with the song when I sent him an early draft. He asked to join me in it, and we were off to the cross-globe, technology-enabled races!
So wild!
If I wanted to be all analytical about it, I could say that writing a song about self-loathing and self-doubt was a response to the perceived rejection by my "audience" of my previous song about Jesus, but that just wouldn't square with reality.
As I've mentioned, I'd given myself a couple month's headway in song-posting, and as I (vaguely) recall, I actually wrote this one before the Jesus one. So I think we can take it at face value: Josh is an oftentimes insecure chap who, I'm pleased to say, has finally come to a place where he can talk openly about those insecurities.
About fifteen years ago, a colleague at a school where I was teaching handed me an Enneagram book and told me she thought it might be helpful.
It was!
Although I'm not usually one for personality tests, the book allowed me to give shape to some of the pain I'd felt in my life. Apparently my childhood wounds had led me to believe that while there was definitely such a thing as love in the world, there was certainly not enough unconditional love for someone like me.
Another protest song, although it might just have been a way to write about the decade of summers I spent doing industrial reforestation.
I planted half a million trees. Wore out my knees for a few bucks a day.
I guess that's where the protest comes in. Just another rapidly aging guy protesting about his destroyed knees (and back, and shoulders).
I'd like to say that I was saving the planet, cuz I do love the planet—but that's not what that was.
The truth is... well, the truth of the matter is the fat cats get fatter, and the poor people do what the rich people say... every day.
Treeplanting is a brutal summer rite of passage for many young Canadians.
Planters burn the caloric equivalent of a half marathon every day, in conditions that range from sleet, to hail, to snow, to bugs so thick you'll end up breathing in a few tablespoons full a day. So nobody spends their summers treeplanting because they're an independently wealthy eco-warrior desperate for a weirdly uneven tan. They do it to pay for school, or to afford the life of a ski bum over the winter.
On top of that, the USAmerica lumber industry constantly violates the US's own trade agreement (and, these days, sets it on fire), so the Canadian lumber industry responds by squeezing the planters.
I, a treeplanter not particularly attuned to his own body, responded to that squeeze by planting harder.
Anyway, here's a video of some folks (including me at the end) planting on the easiest possible ground for planting (flat, minimal debris), with basically perfect weather.
More than three months in and in case you hadn't noticed... I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Just winging it every single week.
Playing.
I didn't know how to write a song, so instead I just wrote songs unknowingly. Like a freakin' child. Which I think is how Art is probably supposed to be made.
Anyway. For this particular week I railed (at length-- where was my editor?!?) against social media.
I’m so connected to you.
Socially connected to you.
I sit alone and cry, but it’s ok.
Cuz I’m socially connected to you.
Relying on social media for socialization during a pandemic is a good way to learn how much of a trashfire social media is. Just an absolute dumpster conflagration.
I regret (almost) every second I've wasted on it, and have recently served divorce papers to the ones I've been dumb enough to get sucked into.
With all my boundary issues, it's looking to be a messy divorce.
Okay, so this is (obviously) where I came into my own as a songwriter and became a straight line conduit for the divine muses. Just pouring out truth, and-- haw, haw, haw.
Okay, fine.
It's just a song about testicles.
A guy lives long enough, he gathers unto himself a fair few stories involving testicles. I shan't apologize for them, though. They're good stories.
If you forced me at gunpoint to admit the why of this song, I'd say that every once in a while someone has to highlight the absurdity of everything and make their very conservative parents uncomfortable, in order to remind them and me and us that we all have bodies and bodies are beautiful and testicles are part of bodies and also probably a good part of my brain is still stuck back in middle school.
At this point, my wife, who I'm fairly sure didn't listen to the testicle song, suggested I write something a little more hopeful (because apparently, living with a despairing frowny-face can be a bit of a downer).
I tried.
I did.
You can tell because I put a kepo on my uke, which made the notes go higher, and I played a little peppier and smiled a lot during the video.
Not my fault it ended up being one of my angrier, more cynical songs about how people stay hopeful by closing their eyes to suffering and pretending bad things aren't happening (because, as we all know, it's the pessimists whose perspective is more aligned with reality).
As the chorus cheerily says:
Hope springs eternal when your eyes aren’t open / so I guess don’t leave them open – keep your eyes closed.
There's also a verse about a nihilist university student who comes home and gets put on brain meds to keep her from nihilisting too hard, and one about a rich young elite-type dude I once met who was all idealist and activist-y as a young man but eventually left it behind for, ya know, the Allure of Stuff.
Call me minor-key-obsessed, but I think it's just the way I vibe.
I cut my long flowing locks off, as I think perhaps a subtle cue that this song (which kinda-sorta subtly calls for violent revolution but not really) isn't the work of some kinda woods-living, David Koresh cult-violencer.
It starts by stating the Problem:
Every day we’re rushing towards the wall. / Believing that we are exceptional. / Rules are not for emperors like us. / So kindly, friend, refrain from making a fuss. / As you take your place directly under the bus.
That's right, folks! I'm pointing right at US!
The wealthiest lil' bastards in history!
The enthusiastic architects of the self-annihilation of the species!
Every day, they say, fifteen thousand children die hungry. And that’s not okay... but it’s not like any of those kids are mine.
I know, I know. I shouldn't call us bastards. But aren't we, though? Given that last bit? I mean, if letting fifteen thousand children die hungry every day isn't straight-up bastard behavior, then I don't know what is.
Let's see what comes next... Hopefully something sweet and comforting.
What the hell can I even do / if the only way to change is to let the animals out of the zoo?
Releasing the rage is, of course, not an option, so I'll just--
Yeah, let the animals out of the zoo. You’ve got to let the animals out of the zoo.
Wait! No! Let's just dial that back down, tiger. Let's edit out the "bastard" thing and the "hell" thing, because we don't need to be offending anybody. Let's just focus on how I'm powerless to change anything, because...
I need my comforts. / I need vacations in the south of France. / I need my iPhone. / I need another pair of top designer pants!
Okay.
I'mma be honest with y'all.
I can't sing, listen to, or think about this song without feeling the RAGE boil up in me.
And I know I shouldn't use words like "bastards" to describe us, because it diminishes the word for when we need to use it for the really bastardly bastards who directly shape the policies and institutions that ensure that those kids keep starving to death so that they can keep affording to put diesel in their mega-yachts, but the truth is that There But for Luck and Inheritance go You and I.
So...
What the hell could POSSIBLY shake us out of our selfish, bastardly lethargy?
There was this thing Tony Campolo (a Christian who didn't suck) liked to say to American evangelicals:
“I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
So, yeah.
If you're an American evangelical getting your knickers in a bunch over my "hells" and "bastards," well, enjoy your shitty, comfortable little lives.
[insert heavy breathing that slowly calms the heck down]
Even a wound-up anxiety monkey like myself has to relax from time to time, and this song's about my little baby boy messing with my phone—making a pretend call to probably Mister Rogers or something.
It's a song about trying to chill out and be like a baby, living in the moment with him.
And I don’t know if you’ll even care. But I’m tryin’ hard to be with you, there.
Okay. Enough of you listening in on my private conversations with my babychild.
In a spirit of oversharing, lemme just share this lil' hard-earned wisdom nugget: it's not always super easy to live with a guy who's perpetually off in his own head, being pissed off about injustice and stuff.
I wrote "Opaque" as an apology to my wife for being... myself, I guess. But, like, the part of my self that's kinda/sorta a bit of a self-absorbed jerk.
The part only my wife really ever gets to see as, like, a treat.
And now, back to our regular programming, in which I express my sincere belief that everything is absolutely fine. Haw, haw, haw.
If this song was a meme, it would be this one:
I've considered going live with it on Farcebook or Twitser or something, singing it over-and-over-and-over again, until my throat was bleeding and I couldn't sing any more... possibly ever.
I still think it's an excellent idea.
If I ever completely run out of things to say to people, perhaps I'll go ahead and go ahead with it.
In some ways, the pandemic was a boon for the Introvert Population. Seriously. Ask any of us. Ask me, and I'll direct you to the chorus of this song:
//Humanity. I like you at a distance – just don’t get near to me.//
Look... The fact is, I really do love humans.
But y'all kinda get on my nerves sometimes, too.
Imight have self-absorbed jerk-tendencies, but in that regard I am in extremely populous and devastatingly awful company. If the general response to the pandemic wasn't enough to convince you, maybe just open your eyes and look around at... um... anything.
The thing about hope is, it's something you only really need when it seems like it's been lost.
Hope is a fragile thing these days—way more so than when I wrote this delicate little song about looking for (and finding) little traces of hope everywhere.
I'll post the re-vamped version, which I recorded with a couple of buds at my friend Joe Miller's studio, The Wav Lab. So close your eyes, listen up, and make sure to collect extra points for spotting the reference to Emily Dickinson.
I am something of an ornery cuss. Super contrarian, anyway. So when a musical buddy mentioned in casual conversation that it's basically impossible to write a complete musical thought in under a minute... I had to try.
And I guess I'd been in a slightly better place, mental health wise, cuz this was another gentle, kind, almost friendly little bit of songwriting:
I wrote you a tiny little song for the tiny little room you hid deep down inside the heart of you.
Deep down where no one ever goes, where the fear just grows and grows.
You know what to do: open a tiny little door and let the song come through.
Isn't that nice?
Hardly the sort of thing you'd expect to come from the mind of a guy who only recently was sarcastically singing-till-his-throat-bled about how "EVERYTHING IS FINE!!!"
But there you have it.
I contain multitudes.
Also, as an interesting and possibly-not-unrelated side note, this was the first song I recorded after my ukulele broke (the tuning pegs were cheap and buzzing; and after one too many blows from careless ole me, the neck had started separating from the body).
My uke broke, and then just like that...
I went out to the front porch and found a cardboard box with a brand new ukulele inside. Hand-crafted by a friend, in part out of wood he'd sourced from the area in the Amazon Basin where I had grown up.
Here's the crazy part:
I had zero forewarning that it was coming.
He had zero knowledge that my uke had been falling apart.
I had zero idea that he was even making it.
It just showed up one day with a note and yes-yes-yes, I may have cried a little, and it may have had something to do with the slightly less angsty songs that I proceeded to, um, emit.
Also... To all the folks out there who think God must obviously hate me for that "What Would Jesus Do?" song, and also lots and lots of my other songs, and of course my use of the word "bastard" in this blog post... I ask you this: if God hated me so much, would he have allowed this beautiful gift into my life, that I will cherish until the day that I die?
Well, of course you did. If you made it this far in this egregiously bloated post, you're definitely one of the half-dozen folks who are perhaps a bit toointerested in the weird machinations of Josh Barkey's mind.
You've probably been through every tab on this website.
Heck, you may have paid the forty bucks to run a background check on me, and are at this very moment in negotiations to buy the house across the street from where I live.
Where was I?
Oh. Right. Movies.
So (as you know, you stalkery pervert) in addition to my one produced feature film, thus far I've helped to make about a half-dozen short films from scripts I've written. Two of those were directed by a guy named Ben Joyner, with whom I have been developing/writing a feature-length film.
Our script, CHILDREN & FOOLS is set in the weird and woolly world of "Ben's Family Life," which includes the liberal Ben, his liberal-minded siblings, and their prominent evangelical megapastor father, Rick, who's been in the news a bit for, um, "non-liberal" sorts of things.
So in the middle(ish) of my songwriting year, in kind of a lull in the pandemic, I drove with my wife and then baby-son to Ben's family home on the gulf coast of Alabama.
We hung out. Wrote stuff. Tacked notecards to the wall and argued about them.
It was nice.
I still needed to be writing songs, though, so on the drive down there I came up with one in my head, a silly little fiction about running away to Alabama on account of my criminal record.
I played it for Ben and could tell he wasn't into it. Like, at all.
So the real insight into my mind and character here is that a part of me just now is thinking, "I wonder if Ben's hatred of this song and probably every other song I wrote was a factor in pushing him to get back into songwriting himself?"
This immediately leads to feelings of shame and probably jealousy, on account of Ben:
is a better trained musician than I, and
has access to an entire stable of musicians willing to work with him, and
has the technical know-how, time, and persistence to actually make really cool music videos for his songs(as exhibit A, I present This Song, which I think is quite, quite good).
And since we're being completely vulnerable here, all of this makes me wonder if Ben kinda secretly laughs at me for my silly little songwriting attempts, and then to wonder if everybody secretly laughs at me. Then I wonder if I should just go delete from the internet all the songs I've ever (admittedly quickly, inexpertly) recorded, as well as most every other thing I've ever posted.
Then I wonder at this sharing compulsion and why, if the goal is professionalism, I don't refrain from posting anything that isn't at a Top Professional Level.
Then I wonder if something in me is broken, which causes me to be such an indiscriminate share-er of stuff to the internet.
None of this has anything to do with the song, directly, but as The Administration around here, I've decided that since this is all just an excuse to explore my ping-ponging mind... I'll allow it.
After a week and a half spent pretending the pandemic wasn't real at my doesn't-know-he's-rich director friend's family's multi-residence oceanside property, it was back to regular life.
"Regular life," in this case, meant cleaning a bunch of dead animals for a pretty-sure-he-knows-he's-rich guy at his hunt club and mansion-in-the-woods.
He was nice, by the way.
But it was still a super-creepy job, wandering around his Museum to Shootery with a feather duster, floofing cobwebs off of elephants and bears and jaguars and lions and... porcupines? There were one hundred and ninety eight dead animals in the mansion alone. I knew them all.
At the time of this song, I was nearing the end of my time working for Mister Richie Bang Bang, but even though familiarity had brought me to a place of acceptance...
...I retained the sense that there was something deeply insane about the whole thing.
As Jiddu Krishnamurti famously said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
This song is an exploration of that idea.
It's okay to lose your mind. I lost mine, and I feel fine.
It's okay to go insane. To watch your marbles roll away from you...
What else can you do?
Dusting dead animals was a perfect vehicle for my exploration.
Larry [not the rich guy] ran a hunting club for men with lots of guns.
I came 'round to clean the place, cuz I was short on funds.
Dustin', sweepin', wipin' off the trophies that they'd killed.
This of course was normal—to ignore the blood they'd killed.
Sanity meant shootin' things for fun.
Couldn't see how this made sense to anyone.
I took the insane sanity home with me...
Cashed my paycheck. Headed down to spend it at the mall.
Joined the feeding frenzy, there, and felt so very small.
Everybody desperate to buy a little peace.
Everybody chasing it, and finding no release.
Sanity meant buying things for fun.
Couldn’t see how this made sense to anyone.
Finished off with a repeat of that verse about losing your mind—a reminder that it's actually healthy and good to remain poorly adjusted to an insane society—and then called it a barking mad night.
I don't actually advocate for this approach to life.
I think it's right... but it's also super duper lonely, and definitely not the way to amass wealth and a real estate portfolio and the respect of the general populace.
I also think it's an easy path to getting caught up in a toxic purity ethic, which pushes an unobtainable idea. You can't fully opt out of the culture that all the other humans have decided is sane, and pushing too hard in that direction can deprive you of any chance to actually help sway that culture back toward health.
When I played this song for my wife, she said it was a shame to use such a pretty melody for such a bland, archival concept as commemorating being halfway done my year of writing songs.
She also, by her own admission, doesn't ever pay much attention to the lyrics of songs. And we had a small child in the house at the time, so she can easily be forgiven for missing the darker double entendre... a commemoration of the fact that I was over forty and, best-case-scenario, halfway done my life.
Halfway done, I am halfway done.
I don’t know if I can make it to the end.
Halfway done, I am halfway done.
Seen that long, black cloud comin’ down again.
Depressing, right?
But on a positive note, I'd like to point out the goodly number of folks who watched the song-video and commented on what I had accomplished at that point. Although fewer than a hundred people had watched the video (and probably fewer than a third of them all the way through), I still had my core group of song-a-week fellow travelers standing by me.
Offering encouragement.
A lot of things in life are dark and depressing... but with the right community around you, light's always shining through the cracks.
Perhaps you look at my oft-depressive body of work and roll your eyes.
You've never dealt with all that Black Dog of Depression nonsense, after all. Why can't I just buck up and roll with it? I'm clearly suffering, so why not just... stop?
To which I say, my dear sweet baby human person, I am trying.
This song is part of that effort. A love song I wrote to myself, attempting to be kind.
Hello, my love.
Who do you think that you are?
You look in the mirror,
you see nothin’ much at all.
But I see a shootin’ star.
Hello, my love.
Everybody thought you were happy, inside.
But I knew you were cryin in the rain.
They just looked to see if you were smiling.
But I saw through it all to your pain.
Hello, my love.
I know it can be hard to go on.
But I believe that love
can see you through to better days.
I believe you’ll find where you belong.
Hello, my love.
There's an element of this that's aspirational... I don't typically see myself as a shooting start, and in fact I read that line and cringe. It feels hacky and crass, and I wish I'd found something better.
Furthermore, the sharp-eyed and extremely long suffering reader will note that I re-appropriated a line from the JANE song about "crying in the rain," and even though I really like that line and the concept it embodies, it did make me wonder at the time if I'd recycled it not because it was the right line—but rather because I'd begun running out of ideas.
I think, now, that it's perfectly all right to revisit concepts that you feel work, and that plugging them into new spots can reveal new insights.
I often editorialized in my song descriptions, and sometimes that editorialization was super on point. So allow myself to quote... myself:
"I love almost everything about the first season of the TV Show "Ted Lasso," except for that time when it echoed the popular (ridiculous) sentiment that "If you find the right person, even the tough stuff is easy." The insinuation there is that if the tough stuff isn't easy, you're just with the wrong person.
As the Brits would say, "Bollocks!"
The tough stuff is just tough. Full stop. And unless you're in an abusive situation, the way through is not to run away... it's to learn how to communicate better, with the understanding that commitment to the relationship is Bigger Than How I'm Feeling Right Now."
This song was a declaration of intent during a tough time in my spousal relationship (which, looking back, I can't even specifically remember) and honestly, I'm kind of astonished that I was willing to bleed that stuff out all over the internet.
Artists hate to be asked where they get their ideas: partly because it's a wonderful mystery and partly because they're always a tiny bit anxious that if they peer too closely at the question... the ideas will stop. It's less about trying to find ideas, you see, and more about showing up, doing the work (and play!) of artistry, and making yourself available for the ideas to come to.
It's often easy to see where an idea came from in retrospect, though.
In this case, a meme I straight-up stole for the first lines:
One day you called up your friends to come out and play for the last time. But you didn't know. Cuz nobody knows when it's the last time.
After that, it was just a matter of playing with and expanding upon the idea. Wondering when the last time would be that I'd speak to my father. Wondering if I'd sense the milestone in some way. Wondering if I'd know it, exactly, when I was saying goodbye to the world... to my wife. Wondering when our last kiss would be. Our last hug. The last time I'd hold her hand. Using that to express my fear of all these "lasts."
So, yeah. Another light and pleasant song, in which I meditate on my fear of death.
I suppose that's what Art is for, though. Staring straight at the biggest questions. Wondering.
Of course, Art is also for making ludicrous, plausibly-deniable sexual innuendos. Being ridiculous and laughing at our embodiment. Taking the edge off by taking our shirts off.
Or, ya know, this song could just be a reflexive recoil from the oh-so-serious subject matter of the week before.
Either way... behold the glorious, hairy male nipple:
No matter how clearly I think I've expressed something in a piece, people always bring their own experience to it. That's part of the fun—part of the way an artist's work can become something more than they intended, once it's joined the broader cultural conversation... or, in my case, has begun whispering to itself at the fringes of the broader cultural conversation as it sips its drink and wishes someone would come over and pay it some attention.
As I recall, this song really irritated some of my friends when I posted it to social media.
Which is great!
Better to be irritating than ignored, right?
Right...?
I think the most honest thing I can say here is that I stand by the sentiment of this song now, more than ever:
If you’re not afraid, then you’re a fool.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
And if you find these words of mine inaccurate or cruel,
then yes, my friend—I’m calling you a fool.
Holy forkin' shirtballs, are we in a freakin' crisis right now, or what?!?
Will tyranny reign?
Will they accelerate the climate crisis to the point where I don't have enough clean breathing air to finish this post?
Will the AI bots tasked with rooting out dissenters eventually crawl their way to this blog post and deploy Tesla-branded murderbots to my IP address before I've found a way to smash my computers and phones and sally forth to an undisclosed, off-grid location?
Who knows?!
Interesting times!
Better to be aware though, right? As the song goes on to say...
It’s okay to be afraid—you’re not broken, just awake... in America.
I will confess, though, that the last bit of the song might have been more aspirational than anything. A little forced optimism for the kids back home.
Before I go, well this also is true:
that it starts with what you feel,
but it ends with what you do.
And love will bring you through.
Love will bring you through.
Love will bring you through.
Now is not the time to give up—
there’s so much more to do.
And love will bring us through.
Hope is always aspirational, though, and also generally all we have.
I mean, right up until the Tesla-branded murderbots get us.
Badass comedian and actress Sara Silverman has this bit she does where she starts off with how Mister Rogers liked to say that if something is mentionable, it's manageable. She goes on to say that she'd found this true in her own life, where a thing that she'd always thought would be her "hugest shame" forever—the fact that she'd been a bed wetter right up into high school—had lost that power when she'd started talking about it.
Before I posted this song, I wrote an email to the guy who'd made my instrument for me, asking him to understand that although I started with the line...
I hate the sound of my instrument...
...I actually thought it was a fine instrument. And although I went on to sing that I likewise hated the sound of my voice, in truth I think I have an above-average singing voice.
It was just that I vastly prefer the fuller sound of a guitar to the tinnyness of a ukulele; and the fairly tepid response to my song-postings had me doubting the whole project and wondering if I was making a public fool of myself and if my voice was actually just nasally and annoying and stupid.
What better way to wrestle with those fears than to publicly amplify them? To loudly admit to the worst possible take—the darkest voices in my head?
I hate the sound of my instrument,
I hate the sound of my voice.
I could work hard and learn the guitar
but not everything is a choice…
Not a choice.
Trying to be what you want.
But I’m just me.
And I am not that much…
What if I was?
What if I was something special?
What if I was?
What if I sang like an angel?
What if I was?
What if I spoke in the language of God?
What if I was?
What if I wrote like I knew I was enough?
What if I was?
What if I was something special?
But I’m just me,
makin’ this noise.
Hopin’ you’ll hear me.
And I have no choice.
And this is the sound… of my voice.
So that's it then, right? I've admitted it and thereby achieved full self-knowledge and aligned all the chakras and ascended to the seventh ethereal plane of being... Right?
Well, not exactly.
I also doubled my vocals on this one: an experiment, but also a way to hide my actual voice. And I ended the video with a plea for people to subscribe and share, which I'd been told was a great way to build viewership and which, let me tell you, did NOT work.
The argument could be made that the voice-doubling was a creative choice meant to express vulnerability and amplify the meaning of the song by omission, when I dropped the effect for that last line. That it wasn't just self protection. There's some truth to that.
On the next week's song I continued the "pleading for love" trend, and also got my Brazilian-Portuguese buddy William to record me some backing harmonies (which people had been telling me they'd loved in our previous collaboration).
And the grand total response was... crickets.
It is hard to make art just for yourself. To come up with something that you think will be worth giving to other people and then have it utterly rejected. And I know, I know, that's a bit of an exaggeration. There are comments on this video, after all. People watched and listened, and those people aren't chopped liver.
But they weren't "people," exactly. They were friends, and they were gifting my Art with their attention (an enormous gift, indeed!) not entirely because it had caught their attention on its own merits, but rather because of a pre-existing relationship.
I wasn't hoping for fans or acclaim, really (although a career in any kind of Art requires fans and at least some measure of acclaim). I just wanted my songs to CONNECT.
The non-response showed that they weren't really doing that. But I'm stubborn, so I kept at it.
Take this song, for example. To this day, I think it's one of my best songs. I got my buddy, filmmaker and all-around musical magician Jesse Rosten, to take a stab at his own, piano-based version of the song. And it killed... but he's too much of a pro to release something unless he really and truly believes it's finished.
So I tried again with my more recent studio session with my buddies John and Andrew... and I remain unsatisfied.
It's a love song for YOU, see, and I think you deserve better than my slapdash, amateur hour attempts.
Also I kinda hated my falsetto on this one, so I rewrote it without the falsetto (after my recent re-recording) and I think it's better, so if anyone happens to know if John Legend's looking for new songs, feel free to send him my way.
It's a bit weird that after all the dirty laundry I've aired during this project, this is the one I'm most hesitant to be fully open about. Not necessarily because it exposes something particularly shameful (although it does, kinda), but rather because it's an ongoing, open wound.
So let's just say this:
Because of my particular flaws, I was not available to love Caleb [not his actual name] the way he needed. I could see he was in a lot of pain, but I didn't know how to help. I still don't know how to help.
I wrote this song in the (probably vain) hope that he might see it and feel my love for him.
I'm definitely seeing a recoil pattern here, where I'll write a song one week that goes pretty deep into a particularly tender part of me and then the next week I'll pendulum swing the other way. So, having spent the previous week in the deeply personal and tender, I veered back hard toward something more general and angry and (self protectively) funny.
This is, of course, a retrospective insight.
At the time, I was operating in the same mode as always: vague panic, as I attempted to come up with something new without freaking out too much to keep me from entering Creative Mode.
Somebody to Hate tells three stories:
a self important Karen screaming at a barista
a drunken guy deflecting his relationship woes into online trolling
an incel doomscroller smugly leeching off his parents while he waits for the system to fail
The cumulative effect, ironically conveyed, is of people choosing hate over any kind of useful, restorative action.
It's political, snarky, and yes, emotionally distanced from anything super personal.
I care about it, but on a more intellectual level.
- - -
Another random observation: I've noticed that my responses to some of the YouTube comments I was receiving were a bit scattered. Like, on this song someone offered a very good alternate line for my chorus, and I said, "Go for it!" Which made zero sense.
I've done this other times as well, and the only explanation I can come up with is that I was so keyed up and self-protective about sharing this stuff that my lizard brain was making it impossible for me to be curious and receptive to anyone's response.
As you can clearly tell from the way I creepily stare into the camera, you are not alone.
Someone had told me I should look right at the camera while singing and because I am a people pleaser with poor boundaries... I tried. This made recording a lot harder—requiring a lot more takes than if I'd just looked at the dang lyric/chorus sheet.
These were all new songs, after all.
Perhaps let's just fold my failure to maintain boundaries into the meaning of the song.
If you are a person who's too susceptible to the desires and whims of others. If you bend yourself into pretzels to do things that you later kick yourself for and that cause you a great deal of anxiety, well...
At the writing of this post, the video for this song has fifty-seven views—which probably means that only a half dozen folks, max, actually listened through to the end.
The simplest explanation is that the song sucks.
Without much technical artistry in my playing (or professional recording equipment, technical know-how, or the benefit of more layered instrumentation), any strengths in my songwriting and vocal ability have a serious hill to climb.
On the plus side, the lack of interest in the song actually confirms the truth of the title and lyrics, and dagnabbit if I'm not gonna take every tiny little bit of ego boost I can get.
Somewhere out west,
the sky is on fire.
And over on the coast,
the ocean’s getting’ higher.
The rivers and the streams
and the soil beneath our feet
are slowly dying now,
but no one wants to see
Nobody wants another sad song.
Nobody wants to hear.
Everyone’s got eyes,
but no one wants to see.
Cuz blindness is easier than fear
Somewhere up North,
winter’s fading fast.
And every new day comin’s
so much hotter than the last.
All these little miracles
are dyin’ one by one.
And I can’t bear to think what’s left
when all of them have gone.
Nobody wants another sad song.
Nobody wants to hear.
Everyone’s got eyes,
but no one wants to see.
Cuz blindness is easier than fear.
Yeah, blindness is easier than fear.
The surface-level message here is that people don't want to hear that the world is literally on fire from climate change. But the implied truth—the place where my little ego boost resides—is that their willful blindness leads to the rejection of songs about the same.
This is, of course, untrue. There are plenty of sad songs out there that do quite well and even I, in my multi-layered self delusion, can tell that this song's pretty amateur hour.
Shaved the scruff, ditched the sickly filter, upped the level of technical artistry by attempting a multi-tracked song, and... viewership almost quadrupled! A hundred and ninety-four views! A massive hit!
All sarcasm aside, I can see why people liked this one more than the previous few.
It was a lot more work and I didn't really know what I was doing, but I think I managed to luck into something that almost feels like a real song.
Someday maybe I'll do more! But not this day!
Because as much as I enjoyed the skyrocketing validation that came when I posted this song, I enjoyed having a shred of a life even more.
One thing I love about David Foster Wallace's writing is how eloquently he managed to describe depression—which is a very difficult thing to do. While you're living with the black dog, it's extremely hard to write anything at all, and when you've sent it on its way, well, it's hard to quite remember what it felt like to have it around.
"Pain has an element of blank," Emily Dickinson wrote.
This song was an attempt to write at the exact moment when I was transitioning from super-depressed to not-super-depressed. To find that moment on the line between and use it, as quickly as I could, to paint a little song-picture of what it feels like to be depressed.
I really dig this song.
I think it captured something. So I stuck with it and included it in my studio session with my pals, when I revisited a number of songs from that year.
One thing I hate about David Foster Wallace's writing is that it didn't save him. He wrote eloquently and with great wisdom, but his depression still crept up and took his life.
All his brilliance and creativity couldn't save him from his wounded mind.
It's a helpful reminder for when I, too, attempt to write my way out of another dark hole. It's a reminder that it just doesn't work. I need different things to escape my depression—things that Art can't necessarily give me.
This song asks for one of those things: the patient and unconditional love of the people around me.
I know that's a hard ask, but I am super grateful for anyone who's ever made the attempt on my behalf. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And please-please-please: if that's you today, do NOT try to write/sing/think your way out of it. There are people who love you and want to help.
There's a desperate hopefulness to this song, and I don't mean that in a good way. The essence of it is this: I know life seems terrible, but you should totally just sing out the belief that it's not because there IS enough love in the world to get you through to better days.
I don't think I believed that when I wrote this.
I wanted to believe it, but I don't think I truly did.
Maybe that's why there are thirty-six views total on this song.
Maybe people sensed my desperation and inauthenticity. Or, I dunno, perhaps the limitations of my musical ability were starting to make the whole thing wear thin.
I did get several very nice comments on it from some very skilled musicians, so... I dunno.
Are you getting the feeling that twenty twenty one was perhaps not my most mentally-healthiest of years? Or happiest? Or least-painfullest?
I know a lot of people suffered worse than I did during all that pandemic stuff, but my privileged position doesn't negate my pain. Or yours.
My pain was real, and my relationship with my firstborn was part of it, as at the time my long term co-parenting relationship was going from not great to much, much worse. Within a year, lawyers would enter the chat. And my relationship with my son suffered as a result.
What could I do, other than vent?
I am only half a father.
You are only half a son.
Half our time was taken from us.
When we’d only just begun.
Now a decade’s gone by.
And I’m afraid that
half is not enough
to hold you to my heart.
Where is my son?
Where has the other half gone?
Where have you gone?
I am only half a father.
Pretend with me, it’s okay.
No one even has to notice.
Half my son has gone away.
Now a decade’s gone by.
And I’m afraid that
half is not enough
to hold you to my heart
Yeah a decade’s gone by.
And I’m afraid that
half is not enough
to hold you to my heart
Where is my heart?
I did not, of course, share this with the at-the-time wee lad. I don't know if he'll ever see or hear it. I don't know what I'd want for him to feel if he did.
Not responsibility, I hope.
I hope he'd know with every fiber of his emotional self that none of it was his fault. That he was not required to protect anyone else's feelings. That it's okay for him to grieve a deeply unfair situation—this world-rending injustice that'd been forced upon him.
Someday I'm going to be sitting around a table with my very old wife and family and friends. I'll be positively decrepit, myself. I'll look over at her white hair and wrinkles and we'll share smile as everyone shares memories of our long marriage and wonders how we did it.
We won't know how we did it.
Only that we did, and that it was good that we did.
How telling is it that I can't write a love song without a hint of melancholy? That I'd start with "Okay. I admit. I love you." Six years in, and I couldn't talk about the beauty of what we had without acknowledging that romance may be dead, but it was all just in our head—now we're flyin' for oh so much more.
Not sure why I kept coming back to the bird metaphor. If you knew my wife, perhaps you'd find it fitting. Or perhaps if you've had a relationship of your own, you'll find birds fitting.
Birds flit and soar. They seem free and unconstrained, but also untouchable.
From the outside, people look at me and think, "Now that there is a Champeen Dad!" I'm here, I'm trying... I've even forced my children to call me by a nickname of my own invention.
You don't have to be an inferencing genius, though, to realize that this is not how I view myself.
In my own mind, I'm borderline incompetent.
There are dudes out there who dream of being father to a dozen or so children. Who yearn for it like lil' aspiring Genghis Khans. And although I have my suspicions that the majority of these men are also men whose idea of parenting requires a woman who's willing to do most of the emotional and day-to-day labor, and who also are not the sort of men who are obsessed with the idea of being starving artists their whole lives.
Bottom line: I struggle.
This song is a bit self-protective, because it ignores the main struggle of "staying present and enthusiastic as a father when I find that super hard" and focuses instead on a peripheral (but also real!) struggle of "I love my kids so fiercely that I'm terrified of something bad happening to them and it sometimes makes me overprotective, to their detriment."
Opposites can and often are true.
I can be both aloof, and wildly obsessive/protective.
I feel especially weird about sharing certain songs (like this one), because the versions here are pretty raw and, at times, very different from the version I eventually landed on.
I suppose that's the price of writing, recording, and sharing a song a week.
Do I damage my "brand" by sharing unpolished work? Would you like me more and think me smarter and more talented if I stopped throwing raw, amateur-hour emotional "content" at the internet?
With so few actual viewers/listeners and no real "brand" to speak of, I doubt it matters.
On the other hand, I have this uneasy feeling that Steven Spielberg's gonna one day accidentally waltz into this corner of the internet, take one look at my barely-coherent nonsense, and waltz on out again without reading far enough to find and fall in love with one of my screenplay loglines.
If only I'd gone back and deleted all the weaker songs! I'd be on Spielberg's mega-yacht right now, yelling at him over the inherent violence of owning a mega-yacht—calling him a hypocrite right up until the moment he has his goons throw me to the sharks, to the pre-recorded JAWS score he always keeps queued up there, just in case.
Maybe it's better this way.
Also. Side note. I swear to Jeebus that I didn't have the slightest idea I was gonna end up on JAWS when I first mentioned Spielberg, here. My subconscious—aware that I was heading toward Spielberg to avoid talking about the relationship struggles I'd outlined in a song about (you guessed it) shark attacks—led the way.
I posted this song with this description on the Yew Tubes:
I wrote this one as an end-credit-roll song for the Zombie movie script I'm working on right now. Statistically speaking, there's very little chance that my zombie movie will ever be made, and even less that they'd choose to use this song for the finale. I had fun writing it, though.
Which, come to think, could be the motto for Josh Barkey's life: "I had fun writing it, though."
The movie script was OLD-ASS ZOMBIES, which made the top I think forty scripts in some contest and was on something called "The Stunt List," but I'mma go ahead and admit that it was not my best work.
A fun idea with potential...
But here's the thing: professional screenwriting is a teeny-tiny target and there are soooo many people trying to hit it. So you gotta be better than good. Better than great. You gotta transcend space and time with your awesomeness to get a flicker of interest from pretty much anyone about anything. I've read gorgeous movie scripts by established pros for movies that'd blow your mind... But that even they can't get anyone to make.
Every produced movie is a miracle.
This is all off-topic, but that's just cuz the song itself is not a particularly honest one. I suppose you could say the sentiment of the title is more metaphorical, and the metaphorical narrator isn't saying he actually wants to stay young forever with his loved one—just that he wants to remain young in spirit.
But I don't know if even that is particularly true of me.
Growing old is... honest.
It's inevitable, so denying it in corporeal or even metaphorical form is a bit of self-deception. While it's for sure a GOOD thing to retain certain aspects of who you are as a young person—your optimism, your energy and enthusiasm for growth, your curiosity—those aren't inherently the province of the young, anyway. And a life spent too laser focused on the retention of youth risks missing out on the pleasures and gifts of growing old... the wisdom available from hindsight and thoughtful reflection.
I am, of course, not particularly pleased with the idea of my own impending death. In fact, it irritates me immensely.
I had a friend. An I thought very good friend. We made art together. I was in his wedding. Then one day I asked him a question he didn't like and that was it. He cut me off mid-sentence and broke all ties.
I texted. I called. I wrote emails. I wrote letters on papers and mailed them to his house.
Eventually, he wrote me a brief letter that essentially told me I was a sheep and that he'd lost any hope of me ever seeing the light. He sent a check for some writing I'd done for him. I ripped it up. Sent him a final, pleading letter...
I waited and waited. And finally... I grieved.
Some losses hurt like death.
Like death, they don't make any sense. How did this country get so divided? How did we allow ourselves to become so addicted to algorithmic nonsense that we stopped talking to each other in real life?
The internet's accelerated human communication to an inhuman pace. A pace at which humanity is lost as we become conduits for someone else's violent and hateful story. Reality is lost. We drift. Atomized. Angry. Afraid.
Bleeding my heart out into these songs for a gradually diminishing response definitely had me doubting myself as an artist. I wasn't trying to be a Real Musician or anything, but I did feel that despite my shoddy execution, the songs were decent. So it was a bit of an ego-blow to be told every week... "Nope."
It could be possible that I have wasted
every single moment until now.
Maybe I've said some things.
Maybe I've done some things.
Maybe it's nothing but a pack of filthy lies.
Maybe it's time.
For you. And me.
It seems that rather than pull back, I opened that chest wound wider!
Bleed, dangit! BLEED!
If everything I've made isn't worth anything—if it's nothing but a pack of filthy lies—then maybe it's a sign that I've not bled enough. Into my music, sure... But what if that's also been causing me to struggle in my significant relationships?
It could be possible that I have stopped myself
from telling you the truth of how I feel.
It could be possible.
Maybe it's possible.
It could very well be possible
that I'm afraid of what you'll make of me
if you really see You, and Me.
It could be possible that now's the time for me
to finally break free of what I fear.
The moment is here.
It's just you and me.
I'm just gonna say it.
Maybe I'm afraid to say...
I love you so badly.
I love you so very, very badly
every minute of every day.
I hope that's okay.
And maybe it's possible.
I hope that it's possible.
Maybe you'll love me badly back.
If FatherYoda was here right now, I'm pretty sure I know exactly what he'd say:
"Much fear I see in you."
He'd go on to say something about that fear leading me somewhere. I dunno. I'd have turtled after that first insult—or at least, what I'd have perceived as an insult. An attack.
Look. Part of the sentiment of this song is complete and utter bullshit.
I know people love me. They've given me no real cause to doubt it.
But doubt it, I do. I doubt their love and I doubt my ability, even as I simultaneously look around and say "Sheeeeoooot. I don't care what the crickets are all saying... I'm a dang fine songwriter. These songs are good, bee-otchezz!"
My friend Chris commented that this one's "maybe [my] most hopeful one yet."
Which is kinda funny, given how preoccupied it is with my impending death, and contains the lyrics:
Everything’s gone from bad to worse
and the birdie of hope has flown.
Everybody lookin’ at the toes of our shoes, thinkin’
“Guess I gotta go it alone.”
That refrain, though!
It ain't over till the dirt falls in!
I was going for an early-folk vibe, and back then they knew how to roll around in the ashes.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had decades ago with a musician friend about a song he wrote about suicide. Now, that song was super, super dark—to the point where, when he sent the demo to his label, he got an immediate and very concerned call back. They were worried he was, as the song itself said, about to do something foolish.
He laughed dryly, telling me about it, and we talked about how talking about it in a song and then sharing that song was actually a sign that he was not in any kind of imminent danger of hurting himself. How making art about pain provides a vent, and is inherent an act of hope. By expressing that hope in the middle of pain and darkness, the Artist (in this case my buddy, Jesse) allows other people to release-valve some of that pain, as well.
Just read any of the comments on any of the fan-uploaded versions of the song on YouTube.
Here's one:
"Not to be emo but this song straight up saved my self destructive ass when I was 17/18 and I will forever owe this band for that."
My intention in writing this song wasn't to provide anyone else a release... but that's probably why, when I got a grant from the North Carolina Arts commission to go into the studio and record a song, I chose this one.
It'd been a hard year of songs. It was coming to an end. I wanted to look up outta the fresh-cut grave I'd been digging for myself and stare a while at that pristine blue rectangle.
I'm super grateful to my pal Joe Miller for playing, hiring the musicians, and putting all the work in to record/mix/master the thing. Also grateful to the dust bowl cinematographers whose work I straight-up purloined to make the video.
Let's focus on the chorus, which is something I needed to hear right now here in this very selfsame moment, at age forty-five. Just my dumb-ass middle-aged self, watching as pretty much every single person I knew in my youth is now more financially stable and better off than I:
You say I think too much.
You think I should have some fun.
Pour out the pain that’s filled my cup.
Grab what I can fore it all burns up.
When I was in junior high and high school and yes even into my time at university, a common complaint was, "You think too much, Barkey."
One thousand percent agree.
What they never told me, though, when I was questioning the moral and/or philosophical underpinnings of something or another that my friends were doing, was how to stop.
Still don't have that figured out.
They say that pessimists are actually way more aligned with reality than optimists, but they also say that optimists are far more likely to move things in a positive direction. I guess they don't get overwhelmed by the dark realities they honestly can't even see.
My older brother, for example, is a consummate optimist who's both donated a kidney to a stranger and started and maintained a nonprofit that's made a real, tangible difference in the lives of a whole bunch of people.
He also lives in a multimillion dollar house with a view of the ocean, while I live in a cinderblock shack by a highway, writing stories.
My stories have changed a few small lives in a few small ways, sure. But mostly I have, as the song says, been sittin' around wondrin' when it all falls down.
And it IS!!!
Here we are, years later, and it does in fact seem like it's all falling down.
Maybe the center will hold. Maybe the global rise of far-right nationalism and populism won't push us all back to the Dark Ages, dominated by whichever tyrannical arsehole despot ends up taking the reins next. But even if it doesn't, I still spent all this time making Art.
What the actual fork, Barkey?
Art's always been an act of faith. It's always been crazy.
But has it been necessary? Or useful?
Think I'm just gonna leave that one hanging.
I will say this, though: by this point in the year of songmaking, my voice was strong.
First, because I don't think I quite nailed the lyrics on the chorus; and second, because I couldn't convince any of my musical friends to help me spruce it up and make it a bit more legit.
Marlene the Divine is a variation on my screenplay and novel of the same name. It tells the story of a woman claiming to be the 150th incarnation of God Almighty, who knocks a man named Ted Morton out with her purse and drags him on a cross-country road trip.
Some of my musical friends didn't wanna help me with the song because they couldn't wrap their minds around the idea that the truth is that God is a woman.
Or that she swears.
And sometimes maybe robs banks.
The story really works, though. The screenplay won me some contests and a bunch of Hollywood interest. It's currently got a legit producer attached, and is out to an Oscar winning actor for consideration to star. The novel is weird and expands the story and I think maybe works okay as well, but I don't advertise my novels, so who knows?
I really wanted the song to work, as well, because I really care about the story and I don't really understand why people freak out by my fictional female God character.
Is our obsession with the patriarchy so entrenched? Is it the swearing thing? I've randomed into a sort of friendship with semi-retired producer and writer who's been behind some of the biggest TV shows and movies of all times; and although he's not a particularly conservative variation of a Christian, the story still makes him uncomfortable. He acknowledges that the screenplay's special... but he can't quite get behind it.
Why?
He knows it's not an actual, serious attempt at a proposing a new cosmology or religion. I don't actually think that God's a Black woman who drives a stolen car and only eats vegan hamburgers—it's just a vehicle for exploring themes of grief and hope in the context of deep suffering.
He just can't get past the cursing Black divinity.
Which weirds me out.
Sigh.
Well, here's hoping we get a magnificent cast and director and find a budget and produce the film, so that I can have a whole bunch more people annoyed at me for reasons I can't quite comprehend.
After a year of folk songs, why not finish out with a big ole swing for the Dance Music stars?
It's weird, I know, but the Muse said to move my feet. So I conscripted my folk-musician buddy Dave VonBieker—who at the time was attempting to expand his home-recording musical vocabulary—and put together this lil' number.
Borrowed the compilation from a dude on YouTube (who was super cool about it), and threw it out as the penultimate fanfare ending.
It's fun! It expresses my defiant insistence that, audience nonparticipation be danged, I was gonna say my say.
Holy forkin' shirtballs! I did it! Well, we did it, cuz for my last song of the year, my pal William Ax circled back with some lovely instrumentation and backing vocals, and a return to my more melancholy and protest-oriented songwriting.
Hello and welcome to the America Hotel.
Only the lonely live here.
In a room all his own
a man stares at the phone
wishing he had someone he could call.
As just next door
a woman stares at the floor
thinking of ending it all.
Hello and welcome to the America Hotel.
Only the lonely live here.
And right about here
another lonely pair
with arms and legs entwined.
She’s lookin’ right at me
but I don’t even see
cuz I’m miles away in my mind.
Nobody looks out their door.
No one seems to know what the outside is for.
And no one ever looks out their door.
Hello and welcome to the America Hotel.
Only the lonely live here.
And then, just like that, it was finished!
I've written a few songs since, including one particularly angry protest song that I'm planning on debuting at an open mic this coming Monday.
Mostly, though, it feels like "something I had to get outta my system."
Will anything come of it? Will someone take up one of these songs and make it more "real"? Will I? Will it be the tittering of a moment at the fringes of the Glorious Conversation that is Art, before just fading away... not with a bang, but a whimper?
Who knows!
I was gonna do some sort of TLDR—maybe throw in a pie chart breaking down the percentage of sad songs to slightly-less-sad songs, but we're already sitting at more than fourteen THOUSAND words, and you and I both know that you [the person reading this far into this hella-long blog post] don't actually exist, because no one's crazy enough to read quite this far, so...
That's it! That's all, folks!
Hope you enjoyed this only-slightly-truncated deep-dive into my year of songing. Thanks for reading! I owe you a dollar! Drop by my house sometime and pick it up!
Have a spectacular day, and most importantly... Go Make Stuff!!!
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