This is still my swan song.

I decided I'd do two things today: bake cookies (or apple cake) and update this blog. Well, I haven't yet baked anything, but I'll be damned if I let slide the latter!

But the concert I went to last night gave me a splurt of inspiration which I can channel here, so. I'm doing something similar to the last post I made (way back in early October--I suck at this!) where I cover a song by a musician I admire: this time it's Chris Pureka.

Here's what happened last night: I was going to see the band Girlyman perform (for the umpteenmillionth time) at the Iron Horse in Northampton, MA. I stood in line for about an hour before the doors opened (as usual) in order to get a good seat. As I stood outside in the waning November sunlight, I could hear the band warming up and doing sound-checks. Sweet sounds.

Then the tone changed. It didn't sound like Girlyman's guitars anymore, and it wasn't any of their voices.

I thought, "Hang on--that sounds like Chris Pureka!"

Then I got really really excited. Could it be that Chris Pureka could be making an appearance with Girlyman? There had been no indication of this on the internet or anything I'd seen about the show, so maybe they were planning a surprise for us.

Even though she's originally from Northampton and plays venues around here several times a year, I have never actually managed to see Chris Pureka perform live. But I really love her music. It is soulful and complex and full of feelings (ALL OF THE FEELINGS). Her lyrics are beautiful, with a tendency towards the multi-syllabic (all the over-encrypted poetry / unintelligible tales of the truth) and tell such rich stories. When I think of what I want to be as a musician, basically what I want to be is Chris Pureka, only maybe a bit more cheerful. (The vast majority of her songs are quite melancholy.)

So I bounced around in my sudden excitement out in the cold, and when the show started, Nate Borofsky of Girlyman got up onstage and announced that there would be a surprise guest--their dear friend Chris Pureka would be opening up for them with a few songs!

(Of course, I don't know how this was organized. But I like to imagine that Chris showed up at the Iron Horse a few hours before the show and said, "Hey dudes, want me to play with you tonight?" And Girlyman said "OMG YES!!")

As much as I love Girlyman, I think Chris's three songs were probably the highlight of the evening for me. She's a gorgeous person (second only to Amy Ray in my heart when it comes to phenomenal and sexy lesbian musicians) and such a great performer. Also she sang my favorite of her songs ("Swann Song," about her grandmother who was a nurse in the Navy), which helped.

Chrisssss will you go to prom with meeeeee??

Most of her guitar work is really complex and well beyond my abilities, but a while back I learned her song "Burning Bridges," because it's a good song with relatively simple chords and I could make it sound okay even with the simplest strumming pattern. I've since come to love other songs of hers even more than this one, but it's the only one I know with any great fluidity! It's also a very angry song, which is not something that I do very often.

A few posts back I said that the reason I've been neglecting this blog is that I got a new job that I enjoyed and I got a cat, and because I was no longer miserable I no longer had anything to write about. It is absolutely true that those occurrences (job + cat) correspond directly with the period of time at which I stopped regularly updating, and in retrospect I realize that a lot of the songs I wrote over the summer found their sources in feelings of frustration, helplessness, and longing, which were all things I felt when I was stuck in that ridiculous shoestore gig (and also didn't have a cat).

On the other hand, being content with my employment situation (which I'm not, actually, on the whole, but for other reasons) is no cause for me to stop writing music. While misery produces great art, there are so many other emotions that I can channel into creative output. So I'm going to work on that. Especially seeing all those incredible musicians last night reminded me that this is really something I need to keep doing. I already have a new song mostly written which hopefully I'll be able to post next week, though the lyrics still need a lot of work.

Have I mentioned my cat? And how she's awesome, and makes me happy by existing?
Maybe I will write a song about her. It will be the fluffiest, purringest,
jumpingest of songs!

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We sing to the dogs or whoever

I'm trying something different this week: I didn't end up writing a new song, so I'm posting a cover of a musician I like and admire and will write a bit about him and what it is about his music that moves and inspires me. If this is successful, I might start doing it more frequently, as filler for when I don't manage to write my own song.

The musician I'm writing about this week is Josh Ritter. (I'm going to marry him some day!)

Front row, whoo!

Josh Ritter is a remarkable musician, yes, but in my opinion he is, first and foremost, a masterful story-teller. The stories he weaves through his songs are exquisite, heart-breaking, inspired, and so human--human, yes, even if it's a love story between a mummy and an archaeologist, or a conversation between Sir Galahad and the angel Gabriel. Boyish good looks and great musical ability aside, I think that what I love most about Josh Ritter is his lyrics. I truly envy his way with words.

It's hard to describe exactly what it is about Josh Ritter's lyrics that are so captivating, so I'll let them speak for themselves. Here are some examples of beautiful Ritter lyrics...

The stain of the sepia of the butcher Crimea
Through the wreck of a brass band I thought I could see her
In a cake walk she came through the dead and the lame
Just a little bird floating on a hurricane
(To the Dogs or Whoever)

I'm inside with my friends
We build fires and pretend
That the night could just bend on forever
While outside in the frost
Are the wolves and the lost
And we sing to the dogs or whoever
(Empty Hearts)

(Yeah you read that right...the title of one song appears as a lyric in another. I've never really been able to figure that out.)

I was thinking 'bout my river days
I was thinking 'bout me and Jim
Passing Cairo on a getaway
With every steamboat like a hymn

Out on the desert now I'm feeling lost
The bonnet wears a wire albatross
Monster ballads and the stations of the cross
Sighing just a little bit
(Monster Ballads)

Then one night you found me in my army-issue cot
And you told me of your flash of inspiration
You said fusion was the broken heart that's lonely's only thought
And all night long you drove me wild with your equations.
(The Temptation of Adam)

I've got a girl in the war, Paul, her eyes are like champagne
They sparkle bubble over and in the morning all you've got is rain
(Girl in the War)

It's a Bible or a bullet they put over your heart
It's getting harder and harder to tell them apart.
(Thin Blue Flame)

These are by no means my sole favorite lyrics or songs that he's written, because that's a really hard call to make. (If I had to pick a favorite song, it would probably be "Good Man" or "Wolves.") This man somehow comes up with these beautiful phrases that paint such vivid pictures--some of those words used are so simple, but put them together and they tell a wonderful story. The great thing is that he doesn't try to over-tell the story or explain too much: he gives exactly as much information as is necessary to understand the premise, and through that it suddenly becomes utterly complex.

My favorite example of this is "The Temptation of Adam," a song about a man and a woman who fall in love living in a missile silo. The context is not entirely clear, but you get the idea that there's some sort of nuclear war going on, and the man's job is to launch the missile when the signal is given. None of that is explained in the song, though: Josh Ritter seems to be a great believer in the rule of "show, don't tell," and he uses this to great effect. He doesn't waste breath on a chorus explaining "Tra la la, there's a nuclear holocaust, World War III, the government has assigned me to this task, etc." Instead he uses phrases like "army-issue cot" and "ransack[ing] the rations" to indicate the official nature of this mission, and lines like "You would keep the warhead missile silo good as new / And I'd watch you with my thumb above the button" to describe the living situation.

(Incidentally, one of my favorite Josh Ritter lyrics appears in this song: in describing his feelings for the woman, the narrator sings, "I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the bomb / She just came along and started to ignore me.")

I'm rambling, I know, but if I was to put my feelings about Josh Ritter in the simplest possible terms, I would say that I wish I could write lyrics the way he does, and capture that kind of emotion.

Anyway, the song I've covered is called "Wolves," which I previously mentioned as one of my favorite songs of his, did you notice? It's a really fun song to play and has such fantastical imagery (wolves in the piano, wolves underneath the stairs!). I see blue when I hear this song--the dark blue of the night sky, the silvery-blue of the light around the moon, the ice blue of the snow at night.

Okay then. I do have an original song in the works, but it's coming very slowly--a few lines jotted down here and there, every few days. Hopefully at some point in the next week I might have some kind of inspiration dump that will help me finish it and post it, but if I don't get it done in time for next Thursday, I'll probably make another post like this one. 

Here, have another Josh Ritter video, BECAUSE THIS VIDEO IS GORGEOUS.

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But I'm BACK AGAIN, said Maggie, with a monumental crash.

Hello, dear readers! After an unforeseen, unintentional, and wholly unnecessary absence, I'm BACK. I'm sure all three of you are thrilled.

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to update. For the past month or so, I simply haven't felt much inspiration or need to write. I've barely even picked up my guitar! But I'm getting back into the groove of it, and am all the happier for it.

Various life events which may or may not have contributed to my lack of musical motivation:
*I left my slimy job at the shoe store and returned to a job I love, meaning I no longer have any source material for being miserable and am no longer so desperate for creative outlet in the face of crushing conformity.
*I got a kitten (!!!) which makes me really happy and also means I have less time to focus on things since she's always vying for my attention. (Though I've discovered that my guitar seems to intrigue and confuse her. Just now she tried to crawl into my lap while I was playing it, and then, when it was lying on my bed, she jumped on top of it and batted at the strings.)

Anyway, talking about music.

This one time I saw the band Girlyman perform (hahaha that's supposed to be funny because I've seen them like four times). In introducing a particular song, Doris, one of the musicians, talked about how people always assumed that the song was about her own experiences, when it actually wasn't. "I'm a writer," she said, "and that means that sometimes I write fiction. It's not always autobiographical."

Sometimes I write fiction, too, and sometimes I when I write I draw directly from my own life. (This song and this song are good examples of the two extremes.) I've decided I'm not going to explain much about this week's song, and I'm not going to say which category (fiction or autobiography) it falls under. I was even hesitant to post it at all, since I don't want it to be misinterpreted, but it's been so long since I posted anything that I figured it ought to go up, regardless.

I will do my best not to allow for any long breaks in the future; I already have a song fomenting for next week. It occurs to me that I'm very close to reaching the goal of this blog: my aim was for twelve new songs, and I only have two more to go! (This week is week 12, but there were those two weeks in July where I posted songs that had already been written.)

Probably after my goal has been reached, I will keep posting new songs when they occur, but I'll stop apologizing for long breaks in between. =P

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Who do I have to knife to get things done around here??

Dear Reader, this week I bring you a Very Serious song about a topic near and dear to my heart.

I don't have OCD, far from it. I am just chronically organized. Jamie calls me a "non-compulsive tidier." It's true!

If there is one thing I loathe above all else among my host of #firstworldproblems, it is a sink full of dirty dishes that has been sitting there for a day or two, while the person responsible goes blithely about their day. Friends, if you have time to cook and eat an elaborate meal, you have time to wash the dishes. If you don't have time to wash the dishes, you shouldn't be cooking and eating an elaborate meal. Leaving a sink full of dirty dishes so that your fellow house-dwellers a) cannot use those dishes and b) cannot use the sink is rude and disrespectful. (This is just my opinion.)

"A sponge, motherf**ker, can you use it?!"

I told Jamie that when our new housemates move in, I am going to make it abundantly clear that I can and will write passive-aggressive and/or just plain aggressive, profanity-laden notes when the dishes don't get cleaned in a timely manner. Jamie said, "You should write a song about washing the dishes!"

And so I did. (Jamie insists on being credited for supplying the idea. There you go, Jamie.)

Maybe I will sing my new housemates this song.

I have so many feelings. 

Once, many years ago, maybe at the Old Songs Festival, I heard someone making an affectionately snide comment about songs that only use three chords, and for some reason this stuck with me to such an extent that I do my best to avoid it. I believe that in every song that I have posted so far on this blog, I have used four (or more??) chords. This song, however, breaks that trend: I only managed to work in three chords. It happens to the best of us, and I am far from the best!

I notice that I make eye contact with the camera a lot more in this video. (I hardly ever do that because I usually sing with my eyes closed.) I guess the eye contact serves to emphasize the message that I'm trying to get across!

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How To Climb A Mountain

So it's 10:30 at night and I'm very sleepy, and I just remembered that I need to throw together a blog post. I recorded the song this morning, that means I'm done, right??

And now I am sitting at the cluttered kitchen table, the only light coming from my computer screen and the white Christmas lights strung around the ceiling. I am typing to the dulcet tones of Jamie munching on Tuscan white bread spread with my mama's homemade blueberry-maple jam. It's a lovely, comfortable setting, and it occurs to me that at some point I should record a few blog videos from my kitchen, since it's pretty much my favorite room in the house.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much of a hipster that would make me, a disillusioned 20-something blogging from her kitchen.

ANYWAY. This week's song is about mountains, in a metaphorical sense. Whenever I get anxious over having to do something lengthy and difficult--such as working nine-hour shifts through Sidewalk Sales, or completing all my finals at the end of a semester--my mother puts it into perspective for me by turning it into a mountain. "You're at the bottom of the mountain and the summit is a long way up, and when you look all the way to the top, it can seem like an impossible climb. But if you just focus only on each step at a time, each small task on its own, it'll become a lot easier."

Goddammit. 

So I think about each final paper on it's own, rather than the sum of all the pages I have to write. A shift at work is not eight endless hours stretching on into the evening: it is one hour, then the next, then another. In one more hour, I'll go get some tea. In one more hour, it'll be half-way through the day. In one more hour, I can take my break.

Semesters and jobs aside, I've found that this is a good way to look at a lot of distasteful but necessary things in life. Nonetheless, it's sometimes hard to draw back from the big picture and look at it as anything less than the sum of all the parts, rather than each part individually. While I'm climbing that mountain, it's really difficult not to let my gaze get carried up to the top, mentally measuring the distance between myself and the endpoint.

This was one of those awesome songs that basically wrote itself. As soon as I got the idea--less actual words or music and more of just an image of a mountain in my mind--the was essentially already there, fully formed, melody and all. I love it when that happens, but it sort of make me wonder where the song is coming from, since I feel like I contributed so little to it: it simply sprang from the depths of my mind on its own!

I'm sorry for the video quality this week. I feel like the lighting is sort of off, a little too bright and/or washed out. I think what this basically means is that I shouldn't record in the late morning. Early afternoon or evening is where it's at!

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

And now for something completely different.

Dear Reader, this week's song is VERY SILLY.

No, seriously. It's probably simultaneously the best and worst song I have ever written. Best, because it's awesome, and worst, because it's profoundly stupid.

It was inspired, as most brilliant things are, by cheese. Specifically, a study carried out by the British Cheese Board about how cheese affects our dreams. (Sweet Dreams Are Made of Cheese, September 2005)

(By the way, how awesome is it that such a thing as the British Cheese Board exists? How do you get on that board, because it sounds like the best job ever. I am so delighted. Is the chairman of the board called the Big Cheese?)

Pictured: British cheese

The study found that peoples' dreams were influenced by the type of cheese they ate before bed. (Read the link, it's impossible to make this stuff up.) I was particularly interested in the dreams people, specifically women, had when eating Stilton:

A massive 85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most bizarre dreams of the whole study – although none were described as bad experiences. Highlights included talking soft toys, lifts that move sideways, a vegetarian crocodile upset because it could not eat children, dinner party guests being traded for camels, soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns and a party in a lunatic asylum.

This week's song is not about cheese, however. What inspired this song was the subject matter of one of the dreams described above.

More on that later. This song was also the most "technical" that I've done so far, meaning that it initially took more than just noodling about on my guitar for a few minutes to get the chords just right. The original melody was very sort of jazzy, a very different sort of music than what I'm used to playing, and on my own, I simply could not find any chords that sounded good--at all! It was quite frustrating. I sought help from a friend (who turns out to know way more about music theory than I realized? Thanks, Eric!) who offered some very helpful advice, which I sort of followed. I worked out the notes of the melody on my piano (which I have hitherto used almost exclusively to tune my guitar and expand my dust collection) and then tried to use those notes to find chords that didn't sound awful.

It almost worked. I was able to find some chords that fit the attitude and personality of the song, but it was still overall...messy. I didn’t like it, and felt that by and large, it still didn’t sound the way I wanted it to. There were also a ton of 7 chords (C7, G7, D7) which might actually be okay, but for some reason it felt Wrong to me to have them all in there.

So I completely changed the melody. It’s simpler and more repetitive, still essentially conveys the same attitude I was going for originally, and was MUCH easier to find chords for. I am actually SO PLEASED with this song, largely due to how goofy it is.

So without further ado, I bring you the story of the vegetarian crocodile!

I just want to register my pride that this video required all of ONE TAKE. It helps that it was just two lines repeated over and over and the words were right in front of me.

I also like the idea of a war being fought with kittens. I think there would probably be too much cooing and squealing going on to get any actual fighting done.

No idea what next week's song is going to be able. Y'ALL WILL JUST HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE.

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In which an apology is offered.

Whelp, sorry about that. I guess seven weeks was a good run for not missing a single Thursday, yeah? I tried recording this week's song after work yesterday but my microphone was acting wonky so I kept having to re-do takes and then I was tired and hungry and just decided to leave it.

Look at me! I'm so ashamed!

I'm in a lot better mood today, and have managed to put together what I believe to be an acceptable take. This is kind of annoying because while I'm pleased with the song, I don't really like how I sound singing it.

But I tried to capture how I feel about summer, and how beautiful and short it is, and how I try to make the most of the season as possible. (And sometimes my arms get all scratched up from picking blackberries, and I look like I've been wrestling with a pallas cat or something...)

I have a few ideas for next week: either a song I've been wanting to write for a while, or one that I just got inspiration for today. I'm sure they'll both turn up eventually, it's just a matter of which comes first. I suppose it depends on which one I get the most inspiration from.

I keep meaning to write a post on inspiration. I keep meaning to write posts on a lot of things. Maybe I'll actually get around to doing that, one of these days.

An inspiration to us all.

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