Ten question from Nyx # 7. What do you find more rewarding, writing music or performing it?

7. What do you find more rewarding, writing music or performing it?

This is quite a challenging question. I’ve spent most of my life as a songwriter, and I’ve enjoyed that very much. However my songwriting method is different from most. Songs kind of rattle around in my head for a while, then I kind of sit down and figure out how to play them. Music and lyrics come at the same time; the words are linked to the notes.

Once I have a verse and a chorus, the basic structure of the song is all laid out. A second verse, maybe a third is added. Perhaps I’ll drop in a bridge. But I never really sit and hack around on the guitar looking for a magic progression or volley words about with a rhyming dictionary.

The end result is often quite interesting. Most of my songs are in an odd key. Many have rather oblique time signatures and on occasion I’ve dreamed up a song with a composite time signature.

Now I’m not suggesting this is some kind of magic. While there is talent involved, a good deal of the musical sophistication is due to my upbringing. As a very young child I was inundated with constant music. My grandfather, whom the family lived with when we first came to America, was a jazz musician and the greats were constantly being played on the Gramophone. When there were no records playing, my grandfather would be playing, either alone or with some of his “Hot Jazz Cat” acquaintances.

On the other side of the musical coin, my dad made sure there was a good deal of Irish music being played. Back then it was not referred to as Celtic music, it was Irish music.

I’m sure my Father had every record the Clancy brothers ever made.

I was nurtured as a sapling in a home where the modes mingled with the modal, and this makes for an interesting spawning ground for musical ideas. Mix in the fact, my English teacher Mothers penchant for leaving poetry books lying about; you have a fertile field for a young songwriter to develop in.

What am I trying to say here? Well, writing songs for me is part of my life. Driving down the road, cooking dinner, taking a shower or tucking my princess into bed, musical ideas are bouncing around in my head. The songs are on the vine, and all I have to do is harvest them when the time is right. Yes, I find it rewarding, but not as in, “A job well done”.

When the song is ready, I undergo the painful experience of trying to figure out how to play it. This is the one draw back to writing songs this way. Some of the cord changes are not as 1,2,3,4 as I might hope. And it seems as if each song has a specific key. It takes a while to “Decode” the song. But I don’t see this as song writing. But rather the larval state of a performance.

And now my answer is crystallized. Songwriting and performance are all part of the same process of making music to me. The song isn’t really written until it’s performed, and it isn’t really performed until it’s played for people, and both are amazingly rewarding.