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Notebook:It's hard not to feel dishonest as a songwriter sometimes. Everything about the writing process is tainted to some degree by artifice. Choice of subject, choice of words, musical connotations, performative nuance: all tools that, with the exception perhaps of wild-eyed, unselfconscious geniuses and crazies, are weilded and worked and rehearsed and reconsidered and reworked by the songwriter. And so it is with most art, most creative things; none of this is surprising to anyone who has paid careful attention to either side of the creative arena.
But it eats at me sometimes. I'm writing these sad songs about this or that—petty slights and frustrations in my life, or imagined dismissals of absent, caricatured interlopers, or rebuttals of philosophies that I've never given a thorough shake—but for whom? For what purpose? And instead of doing whatever else with my time and emotional energy?
How do I justify sorry-can't-help-youing my way past homeless kids on the street and then writing mopey anticonsumerism tunes? Why I am I painting musical portraits of emotional abuse when I've never volunteered on an abuse hotline? When and how did talking, essentially, supplant doing? Where are my priorities? Where's my credibility? When did my life get so bad that I'm right to bitch about it?
But complaining is what we do. It's part of the human condition. There's always someone worse off than you, and someone better off—and over your own personal history both of those people have been you, compared to where you are now—and it'd be a kind of madness to try to feel only the levels of grief and happiness and frustration and joy that matched to your personal slot on that shitty-great life continuum. People who are blithely, purposefully unware of any badness in the world, and people unwilling to brook in other people any sense of personal context and private, selfish misery in the face of a world with big problems: I don't think either is really treating the situation fairly, though I can see the appeal of either position and admire the strength of purpose in the latter.