Let’s Get the Band Back Together

Awhile ago, maybe a couple of weeks before I left for Gay Paree, my intuition piped up and said, ‘Write a song. Now.’ So I tried. I choked out a few lyrics. Really tortured, over-written, teenage angst lyrics that made me very nauseous indeed.

So this weird song intuition felt like a bit of a bust. Although fantasies about writing and performing all the songs for my movie did cross my mind once or twice.

But. On the weekend in rehearsal, Director told us his band was disbanding after five or something years. I told him not to worry. That another band was waiting for him. He brightened and said that one of my fellow actors is a guitarist and they’d already tossed around the idea of starting something. I said I’d sing.

Deep Secret #721: Being a singer in a band has been one of the major dreams of my life. Very few people know this. Shh.

This whole band conversation was really off-hand and chit-chatty. But as I drove home, little bits of lyrics flitted through my head. And yesterday morning I woke up and, y’know, wrote a song. A whole bunch of lyrics just poured out. I don’t really know the normal structure of a song but I wrote several verses and a chorus and some bridge kind of thing (whatever that is) and an ending thingy (coda?) that could be repeated into forever as the song fades out (and the crowd goes wild).

It’s a breakup song. Using sports analogies. Really, I just wanted to see if I could get ‘TSN turning point’ into a sad love song. I think it works. It’s like she’s trying to speak his language at a point in the relationship where their communication is totally broken.

Deep Secret #722: It’s not my first song.

When I was in high school I taught myself to play a few chords on a guitar. Then I wrote a song. Then I sang it for my family. It was a Christmas gift to my parents who have been waiting for me to sing in public again since ninth grade when I...wait for it...sang Heaven by Brian Adams in front of the whole school.

Anyhoo, I wrote this song on guitar and played it. And the whole time I’m pouring my heart out to my parents, Middle Sister is giving me the full-frontal Death Glare. I’m talking, mach ten gamma rays of hatred pointed right at me. Incidentally, this wasn’t an abnormal occurrence. But something about the fact that she wasn’t hiding it, not even a little, was a touch unsettling. It was like my creative expression was taking place in a laboratory of loathing. Not exactly nurturing to a fledgling singer/songwriter.

I never wrote, played or sang another song. I was fifteen.

It is a sad and awful truth of my creative life that there have been a handful of extremely powerful people who have obliterated me. Fucking kneecapped me. Raped and pillaged my ‘creative body’ to the point where I couldn’t even stand.

I’m telling you this, not because I’m fishing for encouragement or laying bare my obvious low self-esteem problems. I’m telling you this because I suspect it’s not uncommon.

There’s a certain point of creative expression where you finally (sometimes after years and years and years) get brave enough to bring your work out into the world. Sometimes it’s to show your parents or teachers, sometimes a creative mentor, sometimes a friend. These initial ‘airings’ are critically important. And they really need to go well. Because if they don’t, they can send fragile artists scuttling back into the closet as fast as you can say Art Fag. (Maybe that’s what that term is all about.)

I don't know if Director's new band will happen or if I'll be the singer. But I do know this: seventeen years is way, way, WAY too long to deprive yourself of something that gives you a thrill right down to your toenails.