On the Subject of Literacy and Drugs

So Thursday... eh? I don't know how I feel about that. The blur of multiple holidays, the fatigue of travel, the throb of gout, the dull pain of boredom from getting stuck listening to an elderly relative tell you about every car she's ever owned, in detail... it all adds up, dunnit? Well, it's nothing I can't handle.

Been kicking around some song ideas this week... but I've found myself being pretty selective, throwing out a lot of stuff I might otherwise keep. And no matter how hard I try to convince myself that I've broken free from my standard 2:1 ratio of completed songs to keeper songs... well, it seems to come back those numbers without fail. C'est la vie.

One of my resolutions of the last few months has been to start reading more fiction... reading is such a powerful source of subject matter for lyrics... from overall themes to specific words. I think I've mentioned it here before, but one of the ways I write lyrics is by "collecting" words (or sometimes phrases) that I find attractive and finding the right place for them, whether that be as titles or actual lyrics.

Or course, sometimes it takes me literally years to find the right place for them. Case and point: "drugs." For awhile, I wanted to find a way to use the word "drugs" in a song. Not in the sense of "Hey, let's go score some weed," but because the word is so evocative, so emblematic of so many different facets of human behavior and interaction.

Also, it seems like a good number of my songwriting heroes, from Aimee Mann, to Jeff Tweedy, to David Byrne, have found creative ways to use "drugs." In songs. And probably otherwise. For years, every time I tried to use "drugs" in a song, it sounded forced, synthetic, and amateur.

But I was patient and finally, I managed to slip it into the song December Static, which I first wrote about here. The last verse goes: The winter left us black and blue And the drugs don't work like they used to I didn't mean to let you go To walk alone into the snow

I think (if one can ever be an objective critic of one's own work) that this is probably the best writing I've ever done. Anyway, the upshot of this story is that I've been trying to read more and find more words and phrases for my list. I just finished the book Kite Runner, which was quite good, and I'm on to Cosmopolis, which a friend lent me a couple of years ago and I just haven't gotten around to reading. Kite Runner fit in nicely with the theme of redemption I've been writing about and so far Cosmopolis is proving to be a cornucopia of poetic prose.

To be continued...

jbg