The inevitable high of finishing a project, of actually getting everything done and getting it out there is at some point followed by the thud on the head that it is most likely to go no further. There will be no worldwide promotion or tour. No ads during sporting events or on buses to support what desperately needs to sell or we're all out on the street. And much as it sounds like a great time, no mega-ego to sooth and massage. Nor will I be the subject of speculation on where the new songs fit into the constellation of my most recent romantic adventures.
No, unlike Taylor, the only path, save for a performance here and there, is to move on to the next project.
On the plus side, there's much to do on that end and to those of us not destined for international fame and fortune, it is the rites of creation that are the thing, the muse, the reason to exist!
So it's on to the Primitive Desires and Winter projects.
However, since Whispers (From a Forgotten Memory) is still a fresh and vital work, I thought it would be interesting to expound on what the hell I was thinking when I wrote a particular lyric, which in this case is from The World Won't Let Me Go, a song of memory and time and the foundational song in the song cycle that is Whispers. You can hear the song at mrprimitivemusic, it's this week's song.
The premise of the lyric revolves around the image of an old man in the place of his birth, of the place where his most formative memories were created. It begins:
Free me from this troubled longing
That drives the hunger in my soul
Take the light that shine all above me
Save me from the darkness down below
The lyric starts with the idea of loss, from outliving those you knew and loved; of not wanting to remember yet not wanting to let those memories die; of tiring of life, but fearing the destruction of memory by letting go.
All the houses now are empty
All those lives have come and gone
Ghosts, they stop and share their stories
Of a time when they belonged
The second verse is the echoed past, the sights and sounds that you hear in your head when you revisit those places that inhabited your past. I think it's inevitable that when you find yourself back on familiar ground there is the call of all the memories you have from having been there before. You see it both as what it was and what it has become as well as what you were and what you have become.
The flowers won't spare the grieving
The only thing I care to know
Please don't tell me you love me
When the world won't let me go
The chorus speaks of two things, the power of grief and the need to grieve for what is lost and of being left with only memory. Tokens such as flowers do not relieve the grief anymore than pronouncements of love.
Buried down inside these canyons
Rolling up along the hills
All these memories long forgotten
Yearn that they might be remembered still
The third verse is about those forgotten moments that capture you when you least expect it. I grew up in the burbs of Denver and for a very long time I rarely returned, so that when I did I found myself grappling with images and memories that I had forgotten and I was surprised by the power of some of them.
Children stare at me in wonder
They put their hands upon my clothes
They won't follow as I leave them
To a place they'll never know
The final verse is in some ways about the malleability of memory. The children are the original moments forever locked in their time. The idea of the verse is that you will change and that in that change they cannot go with you, that your younger self will be fascinated by the self you've become, whether for better or worse. That and the older self must reconcile himself to what he once was, hence the grieving.
Perhaps the more interesting aspect of my lyrical approach is that I don't analyze them till much later; in other words I didn't actually think these thoughts as I was writing the lyrics down. The lyric was writing fairly quickly then left to simmer on low. Usually the most immediate concern is do they work with the chords and melody I hear in my head. rarely do I write lyrics with a guitar in hand. I do consider the premise and the symmetry as I construct the lyric but not so much the meaning which is implicit to me because I already know the general theme.
Fun huh!
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