New Avenues of Creativity

You know, most of my life people have told me I'm a "creative" person. Mostly because from a verrry young age I liked to write. Somewhere in this house is a box full of journals and poems starting back from the age of 11 or so. I give full credit to Whitney (English-Kolb) for getting me into writing. She was the only person I knew who could write poems. They were love poems-- teenage angst-- and they were beautiful. We wrote them in class in junior high. The poems Whitney wrote weren't your typical Roses are red, violets are blue, rhymey junior high poems. I mean, they rhymed, but they were abstract. And she used words nobody else used. They were awesome. And that's when I decided I wanted to write. (Shortly after, she quit writing and started drawing. And good for her because that's how she came to be what she is today-- Miss All The Big Stars Use My Stationary. :) But that's how it started with me. And it never stopped.

I have books full of poems that span the last 16 or 17 years and it's very cool to go back and see how my writing has progressed in both subject and style. Around tenth grade or so, I decided that ryhming was for chumps and that my poetry was more serious than that. So I threw all my rhyming words out the window and really concentrated on using the right word for that exact moment. My poetry was really an exercise in finding that one perfect word that would make you (or me) feel exactly what I was trying to convey. And to this day, that's still how I write. It's very guided by "feel". Not emotion-- but the direction and the ambiance of the line and the poem itself.

So you can imagine what a ridiculous challenge songwriting was when Poncho first said I should really try it. Songs have to rhyme and rhyming is for chumps, remember? :) So it was a hard thing to do. And I know, most obviously 1) songs do NOT have to rhyme and 2) even if they do, rhyming is NOT just for chumps. I listen to Ellis Paul. I know this well. But songwriting was a whole different hill to climb and still is not as easy as just sitting down and letting the feel guide me through lines of words that make me think, Yeah. That's what I was trying to say. I still haven't had a songwriting experience where I come away with that feeling.

However.

We've been working on a LOT of stuff lately. We're not putting any of it out yet. There will be a time when we do, but right now, we're just concentrating on the creative side of it and trying to put it all together. But I listened to 6 or 7 of our new projects today all in a row and went, Wow. Not that it's amazingly good stuff, becuase I'm about as self-depricating as they come, but I thought this is some really good stuff. I didn't know I was capable of this. Of course, most of it is due to the one-man-band that is my husband, but I never in a million years would have thought I could sit down and listen to a CD where I wrote the songs and sang them and walk away with a positive feeling about it. So that's pretty cool.

It's not good like my poetry, but I spent yeeeeaaaars getting that right. But it's good like it's not shitty and beyond all hope. And with years more practice, I may even get better! So I'm feeling pretty good about it.

And that's my introspection for the day. Carry on.