Bane of the Bard

Let me paint a scene for you. I am in the back storeroom of a pizza restaurant, which we will call Pepe Juan’s*, singing a song beside a guy named Boner who is playing my guitar (go ahead, pervs, and get the nasty thoughts out of your heads now). It is the first song that I have written that I have sung out loud to the rhythms of an actual guitar. It is about a woman who sinks deeper and deeper into a bad rut, and then almost gives up before she realizes that she can make things right again. When we are done I walk back to the office and find the female manager crying at the desk. Unbeknownst to us she had been listening around the corner. She looked up to me and said, “That woman in the song is me.”

During the time that I have been writing music I have come to understand a universal truth that permeates, and sometimes sullies, the songwriter’s fruits of labor. Songs can be a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. What I mean by this is simple, yet complicated at the same time, so I will attempt to explain. Usually when I write a song I am taking an emotion that I want to present and feeding on it so that the listener can also feel that emotion vicariously through the words. The good thing is that when I am successful I get the reaction that I want, and the bad thing is that when I am successful I get the reaction that I want.

It’s a conundrum, I know. When I write my music I think of faceless people listening to it over a stereo, nodding their heads and saying, “Yeah man, I know how you feel.” But it’s hard when you let people you know listen to the songs and get that reaction, because then you have to actually see the pain on their faces.

I started thinking about this on Thursday night. We had been over to see Brandy’s grandmother with her brother and his family, and at the end of the night Brandy retrieved a picture of her late father. While driving home I could tell that she was thinking about her father and I started thinking about a song I had written years ago when I thought that I was going to loose my dad. Well, the more I thought about it the more I had an itch to get home and uncover the lyrics from my back log of tapes and play it. So when we got back to my house I sat down and played the song. It came off all right for the first time playing it in over two years (it has one of my favorite guitar parts that I have written so I remembered that right away), and I went on to play a couple more songs while Brandy listened. But something inside wanted to play the sad song again, so I got on my electric (on which it was originally written) and played it again. When I was done I looked around to see Brandy broke down in tears.

Needless to say…I felt like a piece of shit for making her cry, even if she said it wasn’t my fault. I had caused the memories of her father to surface and, in turn, caused her a moment of pain, which made me feel like an asshole. The double-edged sword had come back around to cut me. I had written the song in hopes that it would strike a chord of loss in listeners and in succeeding I had momentarily hurt someone that I care about.

So, the question is…how should I feel about the episode? On one hand, I had achieved my desired goal and brought forth a powerful emotion, and on the other hand I had made my girl cry (which is something that I never want to do). The bane of a songwriter is that his/her strength comes from personal experience and that he/she must lay bare their lives (to a certain degree) in order to produce a viable art. This leaves open wounds a lot of the time and often runs into conflict with the present when exploring the past.

*The name of the restaurant was changed to protect Papa John.