June 26 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about the how governments around the world and tech companies alike are deliberately ruining everyday existence for the people who have come to rely on them. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

My first paid journalism gig was writing music criticism as a freelancer back in 1990. I still cough up an essay on music once or twice a year, making it a small but continuous part of my writing output. But ever since I worked at a record store in D.C. decades ago—and probably since childhood, really—music has been a core part of my life.

Yet I’m in no way a musician. I never had music lessons growing up. My father—with whom I didn’t live after the age of five but whose I house I visited once or twice a month—had a piano and played pop tunes and Christmas music from songbooks.

At some point during my teens, I taught myself to sight-read treble-clef notation (poorly), and figured out the concept of simple major and minor chords. Eventually, I could noodle my way through songs I’d heard on the radio, if I had sheet music for them, but only in an relentless, plodding 4/4 time.

After I moved away from home, I wound up with a boyfriend who was a talented unsigned musician. He helped me pick out a guitar, but we broke up a few months later, and I never really played it. Probably feeling sorry for me, a record-store pal who could play gave me three lessons before we both gave up. That’s the entirety of my musical training.

But in the last couple years, I’ve tried playing that same guitar—which I’ve now had for more than thirty years—at least a few minutes most days. And at some point not long ago, I rescued a little three-octave keyboard from a closet shelf. I’d bought it for the kids years ago but it had mostly gathered dust since entering our our house.

I write, I draw, I paint—every process of making interests me. But having no training or natural proficiency at music makes it feel fundamentally different as a medium. In the last few weeks, I’ve been taking a song I’ve loved for years and trying to figure it out on the little keyboard. (It’s easier for me to work out melody lines and chords on a keyboard.)

The tune is a ballad that sounds like a 1940s standard but was written in the 1980s and recorded for a record that sold abysmally. At first, I looked it up to see if sheet music or tabs for it existed, but I didn’t see any online.

So the project turned into a challenge, and now I’m learning the song bit by bit. First, I sounded out the melody. Once I thought I had that more or less, I began to figuring out what chords work underneath it. It sounds easy enough, except that the keys switch frequently. Since I’m not a strong singer, I’m often pitchy or switching keys myself, which has meant that sometimes even the melody eludes me when I try to nail it down.

So I’ve been doing it all by feel, getting it wrong in several places at once, then fixing it a tiny part at a time. It’s hard work, but I love it. I make little informal notations, to keep me from forgetting what I’ve already figured out.

Every few days, I’ll play along with a minute or so of the song on YouTube, to see if I’m losing any of the transitions happening between all these odd jazz chords as they jump around. Sometimes I’ll realize that some part of it that seemed dead correct is anything but.

If I had training, it would surely take all of an hour to figure out the whole song. And if I really wanted to move faster, I’m sure I could find chords or guitar tabs, or even sheet music somewhere that would immediately deliver what I’m slowly figuring out. The artist herself is still alive. I could ask her!

But for now—for this song—I much prefer what I’m doing. What chords or parts of chords could go here? Which sounds better? Is this note I’m singing really higher than that note at the end of the last line that rhymed with this one? Why did they write it this way? Oh, now I see.

I’m learning a lot about sharps and sevens, intentional (and unintentional) dissonance, and noticing different kinds of variation and repetition. I’m paying attention to vocal phrasing and clever lyrics.

Musical patterns are revealing themselves to me, some of which I don’t know the names of or the language for. It’s a marvelous inarticulateness that traps me in curiosity and wonder. It’s a somehow a relief to find myself in a mess I have to get out of without using words.

There are still parts of what I’ve figured out that feel not quite right, as if I ought to be dropping some notes or playing even more of them. But I can now play the song more or less through while singing it, and feel as if I understand how it came into being, as if I were there at its creation. At times, I almost have a sense that I’m writing it myself, though I’m only chasing the ghost of the songwriter’s footsteps as they vanish into the last chord of the song.

What is it that I love? The way that seeing how a piece of art is made often just makes it more extraordinary. There’s always something else underneath the thing that I’m hearing that leads me to understand it better or see new facets in it.

In this historical moment, slop threatens to swamp everything real. How can we best resist it? I don’t know, but I’m training myself to attend to the fully human, the light deep inside art, and the irreplaceable glittering world I’m hoping to preserve and hoping to make.

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