Jul 11

Jul 11 Po-eeems

Are all songs poems or no? It feels like they have to be but it also feels like semantics. I like to wrongly pronounce po-ums as po-eems sometimes. It makes me feel witty and clever, or is just a little annoying to whomever I'm around when I say it. It also seems like a super specific thing to do for no good reason and that is a reminder that I'm kind of a weirdo. I decide all songs are poems without even googling it. "Look at me!" I think. "I'm getting so big!"

When I came back to writing music again in 2020 I vowed to up my game. To be deliberate and not just throw things together on the fly. I struggle to even remember how I used to write. So much so that I asked my friend Court who played in the last band I had in the late 90's who's also in my current band. Did I come to the band with full ideas. Melodies, chords, words? I have zero recollection of this process.

I do remember going to New Orleans once while we were recording our Rittner album and sitting down in a coffee shop with a pad, pen and a pack of cigarettes to write actual words for the songs we'd recorded so that I could go back and record vocals. This recollection brings up a an uneasy feeling of struggling. That the words that came were arbitrary and meaningless for some of the songs. This feeling returns to me almost 30 years later. It makes me wonder if I should spend more time writing po-eems.

It also makes me wonder how rare writing is. What I mean is that it helps me to express ideas while being curious how many others actually do this. I'm sure there's plenty of diary/journal keeping out there as well as many writers, but it feels like not a lot of poets (which I never pronounce po-eeets...well until now). Capturing our thoughts. Expressing our ideas. Sometimes documenting and other times screaming out. I'm unable to not to. Good, bad or somewhere in between. I'm compelled.

But it's more than just capturing. If that's all I were doing, I'd have a library of notebooks filled with my life, and would be able to know what I was thinking about when I wrote songs back in the 90's. Instead. Here I sit. Speculating.

With the rise of the internet I began writing longer thoughts around 2004 or so best I can tell. The first entries, humorous stories and thoughts on triathlon posted to the Baton Rouge Triathletes website forum. They were fun and I was immediately satisfied by the interaction on the posts. The first small boosts of dopamine I guess, a precursor to the Facebook, "like". While I know that social media has evolved over time, I can imagine Zuckerberg et al sitting in a room discovering how giant and all consuming the little thumbs up was. More addictive to some than heroin; likely a small idea that has turned into a monolithic driver of modern human behavior. An inadvertent discovery that we, the apes with opposable thumbs, just want love and reassurance.

I continued to write things from time to time. In 2007, I wrote of the lead up to a swim that would become a defining moment in my life. For the first time ever I shared my thoughts with the world in a straightforward approach. Recapping what happened as well as some of what I was thinking before, during and after that swim. It tailed off.

From 2007 until maybe 2012 the writing went mostly away but I did write sporadically. A post here, a lackluster commitment to writing more. Longer Facebook posts. Always saying I'd do more. Always succumbing to the next shiny thing, ADD driving my mind, still craving the readers, still wanting the dope of you liking to read it.

In 2014, after being smashed in the face with self help gurus telling us that it takes 27 days for a habit to stick (an idea I also shared a lot) I committed over the Christmas holidays to do just that. 27 days in a row of posts. I put zero word count or parameters on it other than daily writing. What it yielded wasn't too far off from what this has become; mostly random recollections from my brain, first thing in the morning. I spent 10 days in Costa Rica during this stretch, with little internet and wrote all of it from my phone. I ended up writing for 30+ days but stopped like I usually end up doing as the stories waned and the regurgitation of what I had done that day became boring.

In 2019 something flipped. And from January 2019 through most of 2020, I wrote a books worth of content. I was pretty proud of it and as time has progressed I am amazed and how much I spit out. I will sometimes see a post from back then and have no recollection of writing it. It made me wonder if someone like Stephen King could recall anything he wrote. He having written 95 novels, collections and other books.

Curiously, he's written a libretto for a musical but no collection of po-eeems.

Which brings us full circle. Are all songs poems? I change my mind and land on, kind of. Are all things that rhyme poetry. Probably not. An ad slogan that rhymes isn't a poem and for me sometimes the words in a song rhyme but exist to convey a feeling. An overarching unspoken theme or thing I'm thinking about but may never explain. When I sing them, I understand it. I try to convey the emotion I feel regardless of whether or not the words make sense.

Maybe that's poetry. Maybe not.

As I was finishing the above. I got a message from my friend Brad that the EP our band Meantree recorded in late April had gone live on the Spotify and such. This was a really fulfilling project that I'll expand on in a longer post. But the nuts and bolts are that the guys in Meantree reunited after 18 years and recorded 6 songs from 1993-94. It was a whirlwind weekend but super fulfilling. One of the songs, Chocolate, we weren't sure if we'd record or not. It was one of the last songs we wrote together and as many songs go, had yet to have finalized lyrics. The plan for the album was to get all the music done so Chris could go back and record the vocals at his home studio. After recording Chocolate, the melody stuck with me for the 8 hour drive home and on the morning after I arrived, I sat down and in one sitting wrote the lyrics for Chris. It's a perfect example of the words conveying a feeling, an emotion. It represents what this band and these guys meant to me and our 30 years of playing music together.

It may even be a po-eeem.

Enjoy!

CHOCOLATE

Maybe 30 years ago

Someone had a friend his name was Joe,

Yeah that’s so.

Pulling forward now I see,

The kid with the carefree smile

Was actually me

When you get too close you feel my sins

No one builds these walls from within

No lives are lost on sunny days