Playing Forward to Go Back...

Songwriting session. 

Sometimes you are just trying to catch the butterfly.  You want to catch it, but you don't want to harm it, or squelch it, or hold onto it too tight. You need to be gentle, you need to be relaxed, you need to not be trying too hard, trying not to chase. I find it's best if I accidentally stumble into a song.  I try to short-circuit my conscious mind, and tap into the vast unconscious stream. It works best for me if songs come as an accident, a gift , a surprise. Yesterday my partner had all the lyrics, I had a few riffs and chord sequences up my sleeve, that I have been playing with over the last few weeks. We sat on a comfy leather couch in our rehearsal room, totally unplugged. My acoustic guitar, my partner with a classic bodhran. We tried out various approaches. I did some finger-picking, alternate picking, hybrid picking, vigorous strumming, played with different tempos, weird time-changes. We ran thru a few parts trying to marry words and chords naturally, organically. It's all vibe and feel. When we felt we had come close to the heart of it, we turned on our little digital recorder. Best to capture the moment, turns out the best parts are always so fleeting and ephemeral. The defining character of a song is often found in the pauses, the silences, in a particular up-stroke, down-stroke, or oddly-weird strum. My partner's voice floated in the air; ethereal, gentle, wonderful. We worked, meaning we played, for nearly two hours. Time evaporated. We were in the moment, the expanding moment. We walked out with a 5 minute recording. Pretty sure it is the song. The song that really wanted to materialize before our eyes and ears. It was exciting, grafiying. It's always a surprise too. The song seems old, so, so old world, ancient; another time and place. That has been where we have been going with our songs. The lyrics point to the mystery, the beauty, the grandeur of our natural world. Yes. And the mururation of starlings.  All sadly vanishing and imperiled by the careless, life-nullifying ways of Human Beings. How tragic, that it is human beings who emerged directly from nature, who rely on the interconnected web of life to survive, are now destroying it all at an accellerating rate.  Anyway, heady stuff for a song, hopefully delivered in the most poetic and exciting way we can conjure up. We are playing forward to go back to another time and place. To my ears it all sounds very Druidic and Celtic, a sort of a Celtic blues alive in a Pagan world, the  woruld ruled by The White Goddess. Handmade, homemade. Other.