Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It’s something I don’t feel like I really control. ~ Tracy Chapman
One of the most surprising and intimately valuable things about joining SL for me has been the songwriting collaborations I’ve stumbled into with Gracie and Lyndon. My whole life I’ve been a writer, and, in my opinion, not a particularly good one. Stories, poetry, blogging, technical how-to drek — I have penned a little bit of everything and rarely been happy with the results. I read other people’s work with a sort of Salieri-level frustration, gritting my teeth and trying to figure out the secrets I was denied. I’ve always had the ability to recognize good from bad and I full well understand the next step of quality distinction between the good and the amazing. Perhaps arrogantly, I’ve always felt I held the potential to reach heights of my own, but I’d never gotten to the point where I experienced that magic — the kind where all the elements fall into place and something is born that is worth bringing into the world. I’ve written and published, but it was never a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment.
Being a folkie, I’ve often tinkered with what I called little poetry-songs, sharing them only with a handful of people I could trust to be both kind and honest — the sort of friends who will tell you gently that your crap is crap. Wilde claimed “the coward does it with a kiss / the brave man with a sword” but I believe the best of friends employ a little of both when it comes to valuable critique. So, in January of 2007, I shared a set of lyrics with a small group of friends and asked for honest opinions. The song was a semi-autobiographical piece I called “Lugo;” Lyndon and I stumbled around with developing it for the better part of a few months. Even though we both like where it is now, I think it’ll always be a work in progress. I don’t consider it my best effort (if, for no other reason than I came to realize that I subconsciously borrowed the rhyme scheme from Jeffrey Foucault’s “Americans in Corduroy”), but I consider it a turning point in my creative process.
Not even a month later, I wrote the poem “Fallen State of Grace” out of nothing more than the naked desire to impress a person I’d fallen in love with on a both an intellectual and entirely inexplicable soul penetratingly personal level. More than anything, meeting Grace in SL has led me to understand that there are not enough words for love or friendship. Friend falls short, lover isn’t exactly right, love itself is too vague and invokes too much baggage in the minds of ourselves and others. There really are no words for some people in my life, or my relationships with them. Grace taught me that.
Out of such inspiration and introspection, however, my personal relationships and my creativity began to evolve. I have never been afraid to be vulnerable or love spherically and I do not believe that loving one person on one level limits my ability to love another person on a completely different level. So I came face to face with a question: if this were true of the workings of my heart, was it possible it was also true of my writing? Did the nature of the intimacy of my relationships bear resemblance to the intimacy of my creative process?
While all of this was simmering inside me, my RL was encountering a few hiccups — not the least of which was facing a complete household move. Moving is stressful for most people, but it was brutally challenging for me, for any number of reasons. One early evening, in mid-June of 2007, I put down a roll of packing tape, pushed aside a stack of cardboard boxes full of beloved junk, and began sobbing uncontrollably for no particular reason…or maybe for too many reasons. Either way, when I stopped crying like a ninny, I felt slightly better; still frightened, but a sliver hopeful. That shaky kind of “feeling better” that washes over you when you’ve finally thrown up that sick feeling that’s been sticking in your stomach.
Five minutes later, I wrote “Boxes” from start to finish, all in one shot. I emailed it to Lyndon and he called me about twenty minutes after that with the majority of the melody and phrasing completed. I’m not exaggerating or taking poetic license with time line. In the span of thirty minutes I had literally gone from the despair and reality of a blank page to a collaborative finished creation that was (it felt then, and still feels now) a long sip of the good stuff.
One of the lessons I have taken away from both real and virtual life is that there is no such thing as being strong in a vacuum. To be made of iron is to be dead inside. Real strength comes from knowing who you can trust with your vulnerabilities; recognizing and cultivating the type of people that see beyond the facades, accept your faults, and make you better than you are. What I came to realize is that I am the kind of writer that is at my best when I collaborate. I do not need a vast audience — I only need the right pair of eyes (a pair I must respect and love on some level) so that I might hold myself to their standard, and, in the process, hold myself to a higher standard. I know the quotes of painters, writers, and musicians who claim not be in it for X, Y, or Z reason, but to only be in it for the art. I think that’s double-dipped bunk. Everyone has their motivations, even if they refuse to acknowledge them, although I’m starting to believe motivation evolve so much over the course of a creative lifetime that we rarely recognize them for what they are.
The freedom of finding the current key to my creative motivation and process was enormously rewarding, even if it came with something of a cost. Recognizing the need in me to collaborate — the ability to be at my peak only when sharing creation with someone else was a self-discovery miracle, but it also brings constantly into question what ownership, if any, I hold over my own writing. LindenLifestyles was unquestionably at its best when Sabrina and I challenged one another to do better. The songs I write with Grace and Lyndon are, at best, 1/3 mine. I write lyrics and give very minor input on the music. They both write the music, work out the phrasing, and perform the songs. I am lucky to have found gifted people to develop my creativity alongside, but what does it mean for me when one of them hits a creative dry spell? What will it mean for me if they decide not to collaborate with me any longer? What if my abilities fall short of their goals, or vice-versa? And what happens if they want Yoko to sit in on band meetings?
Being strong is all about picking the right people to share your vulnerabilities with. In my case that is as true for friendship and love as it is for art, and so little of any of this take place in my meatspace that it would shock the monkey. I am, nonetheless, real; the songs are nonetheless real. The opportunity to discover the most valuable thing about myself was a side-effect of true virtuality and my immersion in a make-believe space.
Humankind used to write “Here Be Dragons” on the edges of maps to denote the fear of what we’d find in those unexplored places. The real dragons, of course, always turned out to be in our own minds. Here in the virtual landscape, the map is still not necessarily the territory, but the dragons are exactly the same.
At least for me, they sing.
