Post #12: Songwriting and Inner Light

 It is almost time for me to hang up this soapbox and get back to the workshop for a while.  Then I’d like to do some reading and private writing to try and take what I have started here and expand upon it and refine it into a more polished and cohesive piece.  I also intend to return to Garth’s address “How Envy Killed the Craft Movement: an Autopsy in Two Parts” and work on a full scale deconstruction of it figuring out exactly what it is I agree with and disagree with and then strive to articulate that more clearly.

This post is meant to be a useful comparison of craft to what may be considered its musical corollary: songwriting.  Songwriting has many forms of course and is related to the somewhat more refined and prestigious musical composition, but the type I would like to focus on right now is that which grew out of bardic traditions that seem to be present in many parts of the world and have been with humanity since the dawn of civilization.  

Typically songwriting has been a means of presenting news or a fabricated story as a poetic narrative with a corresponding melody.  But this simple pairing is beguiling: of course it can be understood by the mind, but frequently it by-passes the mind altogether to get more quickly to the listener’s heart.  We feel it.  We like it or don’t like it.  As we listen to the song more and more deeply through subsequent repetitions, it reveals itself as the words begin to fit themselves together in our minds, and some meaning is inferred or consciously grasped.

Of course there are songwriters who are immensely popular and generate enormous hype and reap the financial dividends, but there are also humbler versions who sit in tumble-down shacks and on city sidewalks, plying their craft for the love of it.  These folks may make tip money at bars from time to time, but as Gillian Welch has pointed out in one of her own songs: “They’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.”   They are compelled by some strange inner force to write songs and perform them for whoever will listen.

Some songwriters, like Bob Dylan for instance, have become through recordings and performances of his music a part of our American cultural heritage.  Dylan tapped into the folk music of Ledbelly and Woody Guthrie (which he covered relentlessly in his early coffee house years) before he began to write his own material, which became so masterful in later years that many of his generation began to project all kinds of messianic hopes on to him.  Thankfully he let them all down and remained a songwriter instead of becoming some kind of half-baked political and quasi-spiritual operative.

Because of the weight and volume of Dylan’s songs, he has become a paragon in his field.  And every few years some critic announces there is a “new Bob Dylan!” on the scene.  Of course all of these folks are very squeamish about that comparison, because though it is meant to flatter, they are not imitating or necessarily even emulating Bob Dylan.  They are just doing a great job writing songs and performing them.  As Jeff Tweedy observed in a song:  “things got weird when I started wearing Bob Dylan’s Beard”.  I’ll close this post with another Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) quote from the song “What Light”.  I feel this verse can speak very well to the meaninglessness of the art/craft divide:

If you feel like singing a song

And you want other people to sing along,

Just sing what you feel,

Don’t let anyone tell you its wrong.

In the chorus of the same song Tweedy sings:

There’s a light, what Light?

Inside of you.

Having been educated at a Quaker institution (Earlham College), I immediately recognize this as lending itself to a Quaker interpretation.  Quaker theology refers to the “inner light” which resides in all of us as the divinity or presence of God.  Some early Quakers felt this presence so strongly that it caused them to tremble or “quake” such that they became known as “Quakers.”

But when I listen to Tweedy deliver these lines, I think he is speaking specifically of the creative impulse which stirs him to write and share songs.  Of course many observers have noticed over the millennia  a strong connection between the creative and spiritual realms of consciousness, and indeed, I have often thought of the act of turning a pot on the wheel as being a physical act that expresses a spiritual meditation.  Each song I hear or pot I make is nothing but a secular prayer.