Saturday, May 03, 2025

Three Chords and the Approximation of Personal Truth...

Some days you really do feel like Shakespeare's King Lear, you find yourself shouting, raging & spitting into the wind.  Some days, Fate, or the Fates seem like your enemy. You are out-manned, out-gunned, on the "outs" with the finer things in life. 

What to do?!

I turn to my guitar, or maybe, a borrowed guitar, tune it up, and flail away. It's a bit of therapy, and a creative journey. I find that riffs and songs can just pop up in a flash. If you wait for inspiration, you can wait forever. Funny. The shouting, the raging, the spitting can be channeled.

It has often been in my lowest of low moments where a song emerges. I have learned that it is the pain I am experiencing, maybe the pain of the world, that often acts as a spur to my creative self. Yesterday I bashed away on a chord progression, and scratched out some words on paper. I turned the little digital recorder on, and gave it a whirl. Listening back, I think I hear a song demanding to come into being.

It's a process. A mission. A small thing. A way of dealing with the alienation I am feeling. Yes. Feeling totally dislocated from the shite raining down on us here in USA. Three chords (ok, actually, in this particular instance,  a cool riff & 4 chords),  and the approximation of personal truth. That's how it's done. Getting along, going along, without losing my freaking mind, keeping my head in the game. Damn the torpedoes.