Cold Coffee, Again
So yesterday I posted about Jeff Tweedy and recommitting to my reliable 6–7 a.m. power hour. Always useful. And yesterday—not in the blog, but in reality—I had this really cool 7 am'er song that’s pretty atypical for me. It’s called Cold Coffee. It’s kind of cool. Kind of Police. Hard to classify, but isn’t it always? I did have to de-Police-ify it, which, them being my favorite band of all time, always makes sense.
I sat there for the whole, finishing writing in one sitting (so hard), and listening back a day later (today), it’s good. It’s a keeper. Something to work on.
But what surprised me was what happened after that recommittal: around 4 or 5 o’clock I was working on some chords for something else and came up with this killer chorus. And for me—someone who's not exactly a “big chorus” guy—it was a real banger. And the verses came easily too. Which is how it usually works: if verses come easy, the chorus will fight you; if the chorus comes easy, you can go simple with the verse.
So anyway, after giving some hard-edged songwriting advice yesterday, I got a gift out of nowhere later in the day.
That’s songwriting in a nutshell. You can set rules, guardrails, make little declarations about how you work, but it’s random how this stuff shows up. And I think because I’m super open to it right now—because I’m doing it, thinking about it, writing about it—I’m pretty plugged into my subconscious.
Whether that’s some shared subconscious or whatever, no idea. Seems like it. But as I usually end these things: that’s another post.