SINGING WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO SAY
fear, love, and improvisational jamming
There is a new space I have been inhabiting lately. The space of the musical jam.
I can find a million reasons not to write. I can do this for along time until it catches up to me, all the thoughts and feelings that have gone unnamed for months. My most commonly used excuse is that I don’t feel like writing. Simple as that. It’s the same kind of thing I say when I’m in a jam with my friends and someone hands me the mic but I’m too scared to see what might come out of my mouth if I started singing. I say “I don’t have a song in my heart” but what I really mean is, if I say it aloud I have to face it.
I can find a million reasons not to write but I cannot find as many reasons not to speak. I find that if I allow myself to start—anywhere—there comes a point where words will flow freely from my mouth, accompanied by a looping synth beat or a guitar and for a few minutes it can feel like I know the truth.
I cannot always reach this place. So if I’m not ready, there will be no flood.
I’ve been looking in the mirror and not seeing myself lately. I’ve been walking around town feeling loose and empty.
Some lyrics, simple but true? I am not a musician, not anymore than I am any other thing that I make up as I go. Making music, alone and with friends though, feels like one of the most direct ways to hold some of the things from the past and the present that swim in the haunting bog within my body. Singing into a mic, no idea what I’m going to say, is like pulling out these feelings, sopping wet, waterlogged and coated in electric green duckweed and dark decaying twigs that disintegrate in your hand, shaking them off and slopping them down on the squishy banks to listen to what they have to say.
We spent that whole year at the end —of a dead end road. Somehow, we never needed other—places to go
Me and almost everyone I know right now, doesn’t know what’s coming next. At a dinner on Easter Sunday, a few of my friends and I were sitting on the corner of a long table, catching up in the kind of way that turns into telling everyone to keep going, that we believe in you. I told them the most recent news, that I had not gotten into the grad school that I had most wanted to go to. I told them I wasn’t going to grad school this year and while that probably suited my practice, I felt so daunted by how to really invest in my practice on my own. It’s time to start putting yourself out there, they say.
There also feels like a million reasons not to do that. I was at contact improvisation last week and someone said how ever since covid started, it feels like you don’t really need an excuse for why you won’t be doing something beyond because I don’t want to. In the face of apathy, I have been looking for ways to meet it with a self discipline that reaches gently but firmly towards the things I know will make me feel good if I can get myself to do them.
I get scared sometimes, okay, often, that the version of me that dreamed up the unconventional and exciting life I was going to lead got lost somewhere in the long hallway of the pandemic.
When you find friends who are that special kind of mirror, try your best to keep them near. Try your best to keep them near.
I may have ended up in a different hallway or different room. I’ve been realizing lately how I try to use a door analogy from everything and maybe it just isn’t a door. My friend, when I tried aloud to figure out if a door in our relationship was open or closed or cracked, said to me, “I don’t think it’s a door and if it is, it’s like a saloon door, swinging both ways.” And yes, it’s true, I’ve ended up somewhere that I hadn’t quite imagined I’d be a few years ago, wanting things I didn’t expect to want. But isn’t that how life works? I used to want to travel, no matter how far I had to go alone. Now, I want to build connections with people and places over the course of years. I want to get to know people in their messiness and love them anyway. I want feeling this kind of love towards other people to ignite the willingness inside me to be seen and the hope that others can see my messiness and hold love in their heart for me still.
My friends and I—most of the same friends I sat at the Easter table with, convincing each other to return endlessly to our work—were laying on the floor of a practice room at the music school where one of them works. Amongst a crosshatching of cords and instruments, we raised our voices. When I showed fear, as I wish I did less often, one of them quickly chimed in “I’m gonna back you! Go! I’m gonna back you up.” We harmonized our four voices, telling 1 line stories of our love for one another.
I think everything takes a friend. I think every day needs a friend.
I could do this forever. I only hope that I get to.
We sat at a table in Wisconsin after having the best day going to museums and finding magical coves everywhere we went that shielded us from the rain and made the weight of the world bearable. Buoyed by our excitement over art shows that celebrated the readily accessible materials, genuine obsession, and the histories that make it all matter; we hopefully promised to make time in our busy lives for another day of adventure like this one. I had this realization at the end of the day which I shared. “I am starting to think that the way I know I love something, that I have a good thing, is that I have a fear of losing it. I have a fear of losing this, this connection we have, friendships like this.” I assured them the fear was slight and helpful in nature. I still wonder if I should be marking my love for things by how much fear of loss accompanies them.
Sometimes we try to bring people who don’t need to come with us. Sometimes we try to carry things along that are better left in the river.
A friend and I made a plan to lay on the floor, good speakers out, and listen to Adrianne Lenker’s new album, Bright Future, on the day it came out. Curled into a child’s pose on the blanket, I found myself sobbing by the third or fourth song. I don’t know if ever, in my life, I had heard someone name so clearly in music, the way it has felt to be alive in this world.
This whole world is dying. Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming? Before all the water disappears. -“Donut Seam” Adrianne Lenker
I was reminded why we do it. Why we sing before we know what’s going to come out of us. Why we write our way to something that feels true. We are looking for mirrors. We are looking for hope. We are looking for connection. we are looking for secret pathways for engaging with the mystery of the world.
When asked in an interview what her least favorite part of the creative process of making music is, Adrianne Lenker answered after a moment of contemplation, that it’s the in between moments when inspiration is not striking and she wonders if it ever will flow again. He least favorite part is the feeling of being out of the flow, cast adrift in the mystery.
I’m learning that sometimes the only way to get back into the flow is to jump into the flood and let it carry me somewhere new. It’s plunging my whole arm into the murky swamp water, feeling the fear of touching something slimy and alive and reaching anyway. Jamming with my friends and listening to so many podcasts at my job, I have begun to revalue the rewards that come with listening closely, with consuming media about the things in this world that are harder to look at and finding ways to let bearing witness create a stinging feeling of aliveness. The connection we seek, the curiosity and excitement I seek is there when I, too, am showing up and listening. As the spring is coming, so again in a willingness. A willingness to dig through my shit, be seen, and sing without knowing the words I’m going to say.
I can be fearful and still revived by the flood. I can live this life with my head bobbing endlessly above, below, above, below the water.
Wishing you all a new and resounding willingness to sing and listen and dance through the shifting seasons.
For The Record
It’s funny how this was not at all what I intended to write about when I sat down today.
Here’s the interview with Adrianne Lenker where she talks about how she feels about making music.
I’m a little late to the game with this next one but I just started listening to the podcast This American Life and a recent episode titled “Yousef” shares a series of phone calls with a man living in Gaza as he navigates moving not only his family, but large groups of families to try and escape the bombings. There is something incredibly powerful about hearing a first hand account of the horrors of life during genocide in the familiar format of a phone call. If you or anyone you know is feeling numb to the onslaught of media, this may be a good place to jump back in. Regardless, it is worth a listen. It’s on the This American Life website as well if you don’t have spotify.