voiceramble: december 7th, 2022 (Patreon)

**updated post - the transcript of the voiceramble is below - and there's a link to soundcloud here if you wanna download the voiceramble :) xox**

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And now back to Amanda...

......

Hallo Loves.

Here's a long voiceramble from this 5:30am morning. It's been a second since I done one of these. I missed you. I love you.

I'm celebrating, while yawning...I wrote my first song since getting back to the states. It feels like I'm ironically coming alive again in this midwinter dimness. 

Alex will have a chance to transcribe this ramble it in a few hours for those of you who would rather READ than listen...and he'll alert-update the post when he does.

Meanwhile, two quick questions for ya (I'm reading all comments)...

1) Do you still want me to cross-post these to sound-cloud so you can download the files? I got out of the habit but even if a dozen of you are wanting that, I can go ahead and do that (or Alex or someone on the team can...including this ramble here).

2) Are you all really into the transcribing? I assume you are, but I would love to know that putting the time and effort into the transcriptions is really worth it...and that at least a bug handful of you are reading (or listening and reading). Just checking.

And go me. I'm writing music. 

I love this.

Next up: I hope to have time to write a piece about prison. It's drafted. If I get my cake and eating, this will be a Three Thing Month (Xmas song, Prison Essay, Althing...and a partridge in a motherfuckin' pear tree yo).

xxx

A

...

TRANSCRIPT OF THE VOICE RAMBLE:

Good morning. 

Okay. 

It is 5:23am on a Wednesday. I got so tired last night about 6pm, which has been happening occasionally, but not as much as it used to. It's like, how can I just quit my life at 6pm and go to bed, and not have to do all of the things that I have to do to put a child to bed and shut a house down?

Alright, first of all, I have really good news. The good news is I wrote the first song that I've written, finished, really done done. I start songs all the time. I rarely finish them. And Monday morning, I woke up at about 3:30am and I had an idea for a song, which I often do in the middle of the night, and if I'm being really disciplined, I will grab my phone and record a voice memo. But true discipline is getting your ass out of bed, making a cup of coffee, and writing a song at 3:30 in the morning, and I don't do that any more. I barely and rarely did that even before I had a child, and when I was more of a cranking-along sort of songwriter.

But because I had posted to you all a few days before about whether or not to put out a Christmas song, or write up this prison essay, or whatever the fuck, I dare say I was heavily motivated, because it was a Christmas song that must have planted itself, envisioned in my head. 

It must have planted itself in my brain whenever, composted, and gave birth to itself and woke me up at fucking 3:30 in the morning on Monday, demanding to be heard, like a songwriting radio station to which I tune in constantly, and nowadays I'm just sort of amused by. I watch good songs just float by me all day, and I go... oh. You would have been good. Oh, you're a great idea! Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye, I love you songs I will never write! Because my head just lives in a swirl of ideas for all sorts of things. Songs, plays, drawings, essays, poems, theatres, circuses, spaceships.

I wonder what it is like, actually, for a person who does not walk through the world swimming in an ocean of song ideas, and still having to get in the car and drive to go get the groceries. I'll never know what it's like to be that other person, I only know what it's like to be me.

I got up, ladies and gentlemen, at 3:30 in the morning, and I started writing this song in earnest. I actually put the coffee on, as a commitment to 'I am not gonna go back to fucking bed, I'm gonna get up.'

I did not start doing the dishes.

I did not start answering my email.

I did not start answering my text messages that had come in overnight.

I just did none of fucking that. 

And I wrote a song.

And I finished it enough.

There's a point past which you can call a song done, and needing changes, needing tweaking, but finished enough. 

And I managed to write it mostly in my head, it's a simple song with simple chords. I didn't wanna play the piano, I didn't wanna wake Ash up. 

And it's a strange first for me in my life, and maybe it's from hanging out with guitar players lately, or maybe it's just from having done the Dresden Dolls songs. But I think not. I think it is actually just a function of the way songs arrive: they arrive stating their case, and telling me what they necessarily need, and this song told me that it wanted to be a strummed acoustic guitar song. 

Which is a fucking pain in the ass, because I don't know how to play the guitar, and perhaps this is also a sign from the universe that I need to just get off my ass finally and learn how to play the guitar. How hard can it be? I play the ukulele. I speak music. I play the piano. It's just chords. 

Every time I try to learn the guitar, my hand hurts, and I get confused. And I look at people doing bar chords and I say, how am I ever going to be able to do that? My hand does not do that. But obviously my hand does do that because people with smalle rhands than me play guitar very well, and I'm just afraid.

TANGENT.

This is a guitar song.

So it's 5 in the morning, I've finished this song. And I text my new friends, Holly Miranda and Sophie, and I say, one of you plays the guitar, and it's not Sophie Strand, and I need a guitarist. And Holly and I agree that this morning, after I drop Ash off from school, since this is a day later, I will go over to Holly's house, and we will figure out how she can play this song. And Holly has a piano over at her house. 

And I wait a day, and the song rattles around in my head, and I listen to it a couple times in the car, cos I've just recorded it acapella to my phone in the kitchen. 

And here's another first for me, in addition to the song plopping out fully formed like, I wanna be a guitar-sung song. 

So this song is like 95% finished. The bridge wasn't finished. The lyrics were kind of done. I didn't have a melody yet. I kind of knew what it needed to sound like, but I didn't quite know.

And because I love and trust Holly Miranda, I sat down, and while she patiently waited for me to tell her what the next guitar chord was, I finished the song right in front of her, which I'd never done before. 

Writing in front of someone is hard to do. And I've written songs with Jason Webley, but I guess that feels different. 

There's a couple metaphors, and they both might make you uncomfortable.

Metaphor number one is it's really like being in a romantic relationship with someone, and having a lover that you get into bed with, and you're very vulnerable. You could fart at any moment, and things could be awkward. You have to have a level of comfort with this person where you can crawl into bed with them and even if you fart, it's fine. You can just be your thinking, living, breathing, fleshy, oozy self in front of this person and they're going to accept and love you... If you've got a good lover.

The other thing, and this is, sorry to get so scatological, I have often compared songwriting in front of other people to what it is like to take a shit in front of someone. You just don't really want to do that in front of just anyone, or anyone really. You want privacy, you want the door closed, and you wanna just have your moment to give birth to whatever it is that you're giving birth to. A song, yesterday's meal, whatever.

So it's a hallmark of incredible intimacy to be able to write, and expose that process, be in that process, do that thing, in front of another human being. And Holly and I sat there in her beautiful little apartment in Woodstock with her dog Buddy trying to sing along, and cups of coffee, and a kale omelette in our belly that Holly made for us. 

And I have to say, just the act of being here, in my little home town, having made a friend that good, and sitting with my friend and my dog, and eating a kale omelette and drinking a coffee and writing a song... It made me so happy. 

And the song is really good. 

We recorded a demo, and we sent the shitty demo over to Sophie, who thinks that it's good. And then my friends Dahlia and Brian came over for dinner last night, and I played kind of a shitty version of it on the ukulele for them. And they think it's good. And now I feel I have a consensus. This song has now been heard by four people. Well, five if you count me.  

So now I have to decide what to do with this song.

I wanna put it out to you.

But it's too good to just do a teeny recording and throw on Bandcamp. 

I'm tired of releasing my songs into the void, so I think, my friends, I think I'm gonna do this one as a demo. And I'm gonna send it to just you. And then I am going to hang onto it, the way I've been hanging on lately to these new songs that I wrote in New Zealand. And I'm gonna save it for either - hear me now and believe me later - the Dresden Dolls record, where if it's good enough, maybe it lives on the Dresden Dolls record. It's a Christmas song, but who cares?

Or I use it as inspiration to - at some point, next year, 2027, when I'm dead - put out a Christmas album. Because I now have three Christmas songs that I will have released on Patreon, and we're half way there. 

What do you think?

It's the saddest Christmas song ever written.

I can't stop writing sad songs. I make no apologies.

Every time I think I can't write a sadder song, a sadder song appears. No more black! No more sad! It's just not possible at the moment for me not to write only six minute long, very sad songs. That's what's on the menu, people. I'm like one of those ramen or dumpling restaurants where people love the food, there's a line outside, but it's only ramen. 

No, this is what's on the menu. 

Sad songs all day this week. Sorry, this year. This lifetime. This decade.

How does this sound to you? 

PS.... I love the idea of sending the $5 tier some of these ridiculous, oh my god, we just start cracking each other up recordings that Holly and I did in her house. I've saved them. 

When I put the song out (which I will soon, I think, because it won't take that long to record, it's just guitar and voice and sleigh bells) I will tell you a little bit more about the lyrics, and the thinking behind it. And maybe what it was like that morning, to write this song. 

And then also how it feels to walk around for a couple of days having written a song for the first time in a year... almsot a year. The last song I wrote was Whakanewha, so almost a year. 

Spoiler: it feels very, very, very, very good. 

And I am - as usual, but in a way that is becoming so much more nuanced and rooted and complicated - I am so grateful to this system of patronage. Because if it hadn't been for that post, I wouldn't have written this song. 

And this is also why I fear switching the Patreon to a monthly automatic ongoing stream of cash money, because as utterly mundane and smarmy and unromantic as it may seem, the fact that I need to pay my staff, and pay my bills, and can do so actively by the act of songwriting, and find the motivation to literally get myself out of bed at 3:30 in the morning and crack into a song because I have to get paid, is not nothing. I don't think I should ignore that occurence, because between you and me and the four Patreon walls, ladies and gentlemen, folks, people of all genders, if my Patreon were monthly, and I knew that I was gonna get that cheque in a week regardless of whether or not I got my ass out of bed at 3:30 in the morning to finish a really sad Christmas song... I don't know. I think there's something to it. And it makes me wanna write a letter to David Eagleman and do another podcast about what motivates people to get shit done, because... I don't know.

We are in what David Eagleman called in that podcast I did with him "The Ulysses Contract", I have tied myself to the mast of only getting paid if I make art monthly, and I like it! 

I'm sorry, but I fucking do.

And I would recommend it to other artists, because otherwise you can turn into a lazy piece of shit who does not meet your deadlines, and who says 'But I have so many emails to answer! But I have so many dishes to do! Maybe I will make this art next month, when I have time.' And then guess what happens? You make no fucking art. 

Alright.

End of voicemail.

End of voice ramble.

Lovings.

Gladness.

Tidings of sadness and joy.

I love you all so much.