Another Songwriting session. 

Sometimes we are just trying to catch the butterfly.  We want to catch it, but we don’t want to harm it, or squelch it, or hold onto it too tight. We need to be gentle, relaxed, not be trying too hard, trying not to chase. We find it’s best if we accidentally stumble into a song.  We try to short-circuit our conscious minds, and tap into the vast unconscious stream. A stream of creativity. It works best if songs come as an accident, a gift, a surprise. It is weird to write about it, best to do it.

Yesterday my partner, the Lovely Carla had all the lyrics, I had a few riffs and chord sequences up my sleeve, riffs 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, Carla with a classic bodhran. We tried out various approaches. I did some finger-picking, alternate picking, hybrid picking, vigorous strumming, tried some different tempos, weird time-changes. I think rhythmically, I was inspired a bit from my recent close listening to the Pogues, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash.”

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. Carla’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, gratifying. 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 murmuration of starlings.  All sadly vanishing and imperiled by the careless, life-nullifying ways of Human Beings. How tragic.

Anyway, heady stuff for a little song. 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, a world ruled by The White Goddess. Handmade, homemade. Other. – Jammer