songs for Now by the people of Now (Patreon)

dearly beloveds

i am tired as fuck but i am forcing myself to write this one before the feeling passes so forgive the extreme steam of consciousness but i need to pour my heart out for a moment here.

i just finished day #2 in the studio recording this new song and i'm really, really happy with it. i have a finished track in my hands and it'll be out hopefully within the next 48 hours.

i woke up this morning and wanted to go vote, but i wound up in a conversation upstairs with lee, and working on an image for the song image, and then decided i would easily make it to the poll by 8 pm when they closed.

at 7pm in the studio we still weren't fucking finished and it was really clear i was either going to have to cut the session short or i wouldn't be able to vote. i couldn't cut the session short because we had to finish.

i'd even fucking taken myself to twitter in the morning to make sure everyone else in boston was going to vote. 

i felt like a hypocrite. i miss so many voting cycles because i'm never in my home state and here i was on the one day i could have been disciplined and made it in and i didn't.

here i was, writing a song about everything that was wrong with the world.  the other three guys in the studio hadn't made it to vote. they all, like me, had their excuses - we're working, the dog needed to be walked, whatever, and i thought: 

that's it. we're all horrible. here making art that we think will make some kind of impact and difference and we haven't even voted

so there's that. i needed a public confessional, because i couldn't let it go.

....

i know it's fine. i'm contributing my vote in the form of something else? maybe that's bullshit. it's what i had to tell myself.

......

i miss ash so much. i hit the wall last night. i've now spent four nights away from him and it's so weird being back in my apartment in boston surrounded by all my pre-baby life, doing all the things i used to do before i met neil, before i got pregnant, before everything changed.

it's like i'm wearing the entire costume of my old life, it still fits, and it feels worn and fitted and comfortable, but something's clearly missing. my body aches directly in the direction where i think my child is. west? east? it's a physical missing that makes me feel like a really vulnerable mammal. homing to some wrong home like a drunk pigeon.

..........

larger? smaller?

i had a conversation with my manager jordan, who's in australia, two days ago, and he was suggesting that, if this song was as good as "drowning in the sound" that we just release it to the patreon and not to The Public so that when the time comes and we need to put a Real Record out, these songs wouldn't be floating in The Real World, they'd be hoarded in a beautiful box marked Later, for When the Public and the Press May Care.

it's something that i've thought about from so many different angles.

the whole exercise is so confused at this point

what are these songs? who are they for? when? why? 

he was disheartened when i said: no, whatever it is i'm going to write needs to go out to the world, and plus, i said, we are kidding ourselves if we think that 11,000 people having access to a song isn't basically like the public having access to the song. it's just the way you define The Public. my whole philosophy, i argued, is that these patrons (that's you) are giving me a salary to make music and do what i want and share the results with the world out there - it's not a fan club where i make music in a cave and keep us here, it's more like real old-school patronage where you supply me with paints to create a mural in the place everyone can see it.

but i didn't totally buy my own argument. there's nothing wrong with demo-ing a song for a backstage group. i've never really had a problem with that. what was it?

it was when i was walking home from the studio tonight, exhausted and kind of delirious and confused, that i realized that it's about something bigger.

these songs that i'm writing fast - this is #2 of who knows how many, hopefully this goes on forever - aren't just about me creating something that will come out later with actual fanfare and glitter. 

the fanfare and glitter, to me, however small, is the possibility of creating art in real time. like the way bowie can leave the building and the covers that jherek and i made can come out six days later. you don't wait six months for a funeral. some things make more sense to do right away.

when i read through 600 comments and then strap myself to a chair to write something NOW NOW NOW about NOW NOW NOW part of the whole exercise is that the listening also has to be done NOW NOW NOW, because this is a living, breathing conversation and it is the very immediacy of the process that makes me want to do it.

this isn't like the way i used to make art. 

what i'm doing now feels like it actually relies on everything taking place inside a different time frame.

giving you this song and keeping it from the world (or keeping you from sharing it with the world) .... i don't know, it's sort of like someone asking me how i am and me saying "sure...i'll tell you how i am in like five or six months". 

maybe it's just me clinging to the fact that i am an instant gratification addict.

but i'd to think it's more like me loving the immediacy of the internet and the possibilities herein as an art form in itself, and it's what i've been missing lately as the internet (and social media) seems to be going down a hellhole of it's own making, and the sharing and collision and joy has been drained out of it.

i used to write songs and have no idea how long they'd take to make it on a record and into someone's CD player and ears and hearts. years, usually. months if you were lucky. certainly never days, never hours.

but this is what folk music, fundamentally, is. how it works.

songs for Now by the people of Now about what's happening Now.

i can't imagine "four dead in ohio" being saved by crosby stills nash & young for a record that was destined to come out two years later because of sales quarters and album cycles. it doesn't work like that.

and maybe it's because this music i've been writing is so directly connected to current events (what events aren't current at some point?), and how helpless i feel (don't remind me that i didn't vote) about what the fuck is going on out there. what's going on out there scares me in a way i'm not used to.

i think this is my way of dealing with that

or maybe there are different kinds of music 

Now Music

and

Fine For Later Music.

right now

i'm making Now Music.

i'm so tired.

.........

closing remarks

none of this would have happened without the patreon....whether you're giving me $1 or $5 for this thing that i am calling the making of Now Things. i would have spent the last few days feeling the vague pull to write, but i wouldn't have found the discipline to strap myself to the song chair....

other things will happen Later. the pressing of CDs and vinyls, the tours, the exchange and promotion and the whole grand theater of putting out albums and calling it the important part. 

that's not this.

this is different. this is the important part. 

with your dollars and your comments and your encouragement and your downloads when i send you this shit: you are supporting Me, Working, Now. 

...........

if i sound lost or melancholy or whatever, i'm seriously not. i'm ecstatic. i'm just exhausted and knew that if i didn't write this now, nonsense and typos and all, i'd lose it.

this is what i was talking about. 

it's a Now thing.

i love you,i'm grateful, THIS IS HAPPENING.

that's all. 

for Now.

xzzzzzzz

afp

---------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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