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Good Songs? June 11, 2012
It’s Sunday night and I’m pooped. It was a long weekend with lots going on after a very long week with even more to do. I thought living way up in the Rocky Mountains would slow my life down, but there’s just as much to do here as there is anywhere else. I was hoping to include the new song I wrote and recorded last week. Alas, the people I’m licensing the song to asked me not to post it yet so that they could release it first. Not sharing it when it’s been so long since I’ve written anything that was ready for others to hear (like, finished, I mean!) is a big bummer. The good news is that I did finish it and it turned out well enough for the producer of the someday-to-be-released CD to tell me that it gave her all kinds of goose bumps – the litmus test for good songs. Of course, some people will get goose bumps when they hear a song, and someone else will drag it to the trash, so it’s not an absolute test of whether something’s good or not. It just means that that particular person liked the song. This business of whether a song (or a painting or a book) is any good or not is a really important question for creative people to wrestle with. I spent the early part of my song writing life thinking that a song was only good if everyone liked it, but that’s not true. It’s a painful and simultaneously liberating realization to make. I have about 50 songs in my “catalogue,” which is to say I have that many songs out that a person can buy if they want to. Over the years, every single one of my songs has been picked by at least one person who calls it their favorite Bar Scott song. That amazes me! A song that I wrote that I would have described as stinky or average, is the same song that someone else plays over and over again in their iPod! That song obviously touches them somehow. What I find so freeing about this is that it means I might as well write whatever I want because there’s no one style that everybody likes. It was also important for me to learn that the only people it was worth sharing my music with were the people who actually liked it. Convincing those that didn’t was a waste of my time and money. It seems so obvious to me now, but for a long time I used a lot of energy trying to get people who weren’t interested in me to listen to my songs. Now I just make the songs available to people who want to hear them. It’s a much less stressful way to live, so I’m happier. So I’ll post the song when I can and really look forward to doing so. I’ve felt a little lost without my song writing these last few years and I’m grateful that it’s finally coming together again. I’ll be heading to New York again next week to start rehearsals for a batch of new songs, and I’m pretty sure a few of you will like at least one of them. We’ll see… Have a great week, and thank you again for being out there. Your reading this makes it meaningful for me to write it. Love, |
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