Friction Farm acoustic duo

Sub titled: What I learned in the song circle.

I’ve been cleaning my office. On the surface it already appears tidy. I have a small table that serves as a desk. No drawers, no where to hide anything, so that helps. I have some papers in folders. Behind a curtain there is one drawer, one basket and three shelves. How bad could it get? And so I never feel like I need to deal with it. I moved into this office four years ago. It has never been organized, de-cluttered, sorted. Never.

I dove into what should be an hour-long task. Have you done this? Why didn’t anyone warn me? Each folder, each pile was a geologic era to be studied. After a short while I decided that this egozoic era was not worth study. I piled paper into two stacks. One can be re-used, writing on the back, the other recycled. Done.

But before that moment of revelation, I found pages from various song writing circles. Our typed song lyrics which had been handed out to a circle of listeners. Fellow writers had critiqued our first, or second drafts and offered thoughtful comments. Often I had highlighted those comments which were the most useful and helpful in rewriting and crafting the songs. They fell into just a few categories.

Overwhelmingly the most frequent and most useful was a simple line through a word. Redundant, excessive, superfluous, extra. I’m a word hog. After years of seeing this same edit, I continue to hoard words in my first drafts, but I have learned to self edit by the second edition. The second most frequent was a mixing of tenses. Verbs morphed from past to present to future. Occasionally I forced a rhyme and slightly more frequently forced a rhythm, choosing a word simply because it fit the meter. Finally, from time to time, I was lazy with my word choice. It was interesting to see the evidence across a half-dozen year time line. I committed them to the scrap-paper heap and moved on. But they lingered in my mind, which refuses to be organized or de-cluttered.

Our habits are telling. I’m convinced that they spill over into many aspects of our being. Extra words. Why? To fill the space. No doubt that is the reason for me. A word on every beat, because otherwise there is silence. I’m a writer, an absence of words is an absence of me. But it is not. The work is a combination of the sounds and the silence. I know that. I know both have power, more together. But apparently I needed reminding. A lot of reminding. My recent work shows that I recognized this and have become capable of self-editing that vice. In songwriting. What about the other aspects of my life? Where else am I excessive, what am I hoarding? Where else do I fear being erased?

Which brings us to tenses. Past. Present. Future. Do I co-mingle those outside a song? Forget that the past is done and try to drag it into the present? Do I obsess about the future while the present slips by? A quick scan of a page shows me if I’ve done that lyrically. But I don’t have a behavioral critique circle. Oh. Yes. I definitely do. Perhaps they could write out polite suggestions that I could read later. It worked for songwriting.

Forcing rhyme and rhythm. Choosing an easy word. Those are both symptoms. They are some combination of laziness and conformity. I don’t like that description. I don’t want to be lazy or settled into a conforming to a routine. But clearly I do want those things sometimes. Often enough to form a pattern of criticism. Comfort zone is aptly named. Of course there is nothing wrong with seeking comfort in familiar things. Until it becomes defining and confining, an excuse for not taking a risk or making the effort. And there it is again, art imitating life.

Hopefully when I check in with myself in the next decade I will have learned to self-edit some of these bad habits. What part of me will be turned over and re-used and what will end up in the rubbish bin?