This is pretty much the last of the ones in the vault, and it goes way back to January.  There are a few others, but even if I still liked the songs, and mostly I don’t, they’d need to be re-recorded anyway.  I’ve been hesitant to use this one, because it kind of creeps me out.  I decided to use it because I thought it might creep you out, too. 

Autobiographical Writing.  The other reason I’m using it is because it’s a good jumping-off point to talk about what it means to say, or to ask whether, something is autobiographical.  That topic and this song go well together, if for no other reason than to make clear that I’m not planning to trade in the family for a spot under the Waugh/Allen Parkway overpass. 

If I start that discussion, though, I’m in danger of going off on another 3,000 word screed of pomposity like last week’s country music thing, which I got only partly right, and partly right is worse than wrong in some cases.  I’ll probably revisit that topic later and try to refine my arguments better. 

As for the autobiographical question, as I said in that post of a couple of weeks ago, all writing can’t help but be autobiographical, but it doesn’t mean that the writing recounts things that literally occurred.  There are writers, of course, who use real events from their lives as a basis for their fiction or purported non-fiction (i.e., the whole phony genre called “memoir,” which I could rant about for 3,000 words easily.)  That’s irrelevant.  The fact that Hemingway has very much in common, surface-biography-wise, with the heroes of his fiction is no more or less revealing about Hemingway personally or his work than Anne Rice’s life is revealed or not revealed by writing about vampires.  You don’t really know more about Hemingway by reading his fiction (or nonfiction) than you know about Anne Rice from reading hers, nor do you know any less about Anne Rice than you know about Hemingway.  The writer can’t hide his or her preoccupations or influences nor can he or she hide behind them.  And most writers have a hard time separating facts from whatever the opposite of a fact is.

And what the writer is mostly revealing is what he or she has read or listened to up to that point—i.e., “autobiography,” at least the sort that strives for some kind of literary or other artistic merit, is really the story of the writer’s literary, musical or artistic influences, not what the writer did on February 16, 1993.  The surface details, the story, the plot, are chosen for any number of reasons, but the least of them is that “it really happened so it must be true.” 

Anyway, why would anybody care what really happened?  The brilliant songwriter Todd Snider, who is exempt from my diatribes against protest songs because his protest songs are funny and sad at the same time, said (I’m paraphrasing), “I’m not telling you this shit because I’m trying to ram my politics down your throat.  I’m telling you this shit because it rhymes.”  

So when you’re reading Hemingway you’re really reading Hemingway reading Jack London and Stephen Crane and Ivan Turgenev and filtering that reading through the memory of fishing with his father in Michigan, plus a bunch of other stuff.  When you’re listening to “Ray” you’re listening to me remembering listening to Leonard Cohen and seeing an empty park bench one gloomy day on the footpath along Heights Boulevard, plus a bunch of other stuff.  (The reason this song sounds like it does is semi-intentional.  I was going for the same sound I remembered from when I first listened to Leonard Cohen, which was when my friend Katherine Hester loaned me the “Best of Leonard Cohen” LP.  My record player wasn’t the best in the world.  What I keep forgetting is that by the time the song is recorded, put on a CD, imported in iTunes, then imported from there into the video, then uploaded to  youtube, the audio has been compressed so many times that it already will sound like the old Victrola anyway, so there’s really no need to go for that effect on the front end.) 

 Why those connections occur is mysterious and is probably why anybody gets up at all in the morning:  What might happen today that might make yesterday make sense?  Mostly I’m telling you this shit because it rhymes.

Announcement.  Speaking of 3,000 word essays, that’s what this one was on Friday when I first drafted it.  I was set to announce that nutcracker scholars had determined that a nutcracker year is actually half as long as a human year, which would mean that the project would be fully complete next week.  That research is underway and the announcement might yet be made, but Saturday I bought a bass.  So the project will continue until further notice.  Further notice is below.

How Long This Stuff Takes.  People have asked me how long it takes to do this stuff.  I tell them it’s taken the same amount of time it’s taken me to do everything else:  a little over 42 years so far.  Then they call me a smartass.  I tell them they don’t understand, that they need to see it written down, and then they’ll see how witty I’ve just been.  They say “Yeah, whatever” and tell me good luck finding somebody else to be my kid’s cubmaster.

My point is that if I weren’t doing this I’d be doing something like this, so it might as well be this.  I don’t know how long it takes because I’m always kind of working on it.  Somebody really did marvel, in a way that showed he was kind of repulsed, at how much time somebody would spend on something so demonstrably unlucrative.  It came to be revealed later in the conversation that this person had watched the entire British Open on TV.  A whole golf tournament!  That’s like watching a whole cricket match!  The time I have spent on all of the 25 entries posted so far still does not equal watching the whole British Open, or all 619 episodes of The Wire, or the past eleven seasons of Dancing With America’s Funniest Most Wanted or whatever people are watching on their TVs and telling me about on my computer night after night.

Further Notice.  But I am going to take a break at the halfway point.  Next week will be on time (though I got nothing ready right now), and then I plan to take a month or so off.  I’ll commit to a resumption date next week.  I am out of recorded songs, and I have a bunch of stuff that’s half-completed or seven-eighths-completed (the 3,000 words was a catalog of “Songs That Were Not Played.”  There were 42 on the list, coincidentally, most of them unfinished, none of them recorded.)  I have no video left.  In case you hadn’t noticed.  So it’s time to refill the tank a bit. 

It’s been tough to do much recording this summer because the kids have been out of school, so somebody’s always opening the garage door right in the middle of some soulful riff, and because it’s so hot out here without the AC on.  I also want to see if I can figure out my equipment a bit better.  I plan to get an electric guitar too, maybe some better or additional recording equipment.  All of the stuff so far has been done with cheap equipment under hurried conditions (a 10W practice amp is just not cutting it.  I have a big amp, but it’s in Spencer’s storage unit in Graham and has been for about ten years.  And it hadn’t been played for over ten years before that.  No idea what it would sound like now.)   Before this is all over I’d like to do at least one or two songs that have better production values and not have to settle for the first or second take on everything.  There’s all kinds of recording tricks I don’t know, like using patches and loops and editing software so that if you mess up three minutes into a song you have to fix only that part and not do the whole thing over again.  Not to mention mixing and other sound design software and tricks.

 I don’t think I’ll figure those out and am not even sure my machine can do them all, but I’d at least like to learn how to re-use a track, because on a lot of these songs a simple snare beat would be nice, and it would be nice to use the same track for various songs without having to re-record it.  I’m also going to buy a snare drum.  I forgot to tell you that.

Todd Snider.  Todd Snider’s one of my favorite songwriters and certainly my favorite of songwriters in my generation.  His songs are artless and effortless; they sound like they just sort of happen all on their own.  Anybody who has had an old friend who became a whore can identify with this one, which is one of his more touching ones.  (You gotta put up with him tuning his guitar for a minute or so, just like in real life.)