Striving and Letting Go
As I write this I’m listening to Fiona Apple’s most recent album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters”. I saw at least one national magazine choose this as the “best album of the year”. They might just be right. I’m completely blown away by, and in awe of, her ability and willingness to let her subconscious pour out through her voice, through her hands, into the room and onto “tape”. It’s obviously not random, unconsidered or unedited but my god is it free and intriguing.
My envy of her ability and earned position to put out music so unorthodox and unfettered by “norms”, knowing that it will be heard, is the same admiration I have for bands like The Flaming Lips. The lead singer/creator, Wayne Coyne, was relentlessly himself, did what gave him joy and satisfaction, no matter how bizarre, from the get-go. That authentic enthusiasm and self-confidence drew other like-minded players and an audience who now, rightly, celebrate in abandon every beautiful, strange thing he does. Good for him! Good for Fiona!
Here’s the thing… I believe that music is a window into the eternal. A peek into the underlying reality from which everything else arises. It might be Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #2, or Flaming Lips “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton”, Fiona’s “Under the Table”, Jackson Browne’s “Pretender”, or The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”. Occasionally things come together and create something that is more than the sum of the parts. Some kind of magic happens and the intention, practice, creation and performance fall like tumblers on a cosmic combination lock and a door opens to what “being” is all about. It feels like joy and sublime sorrow. It looks like dancing and collapse. The trick is you have to simultaneously let and make it happen. Somewhere between striving and allowance. A combination of intense learning and complete letting go.
So where does that leave a writer/artist..human.. like myself? With too many voices in my head, too long steeped in the creation of hook-based 3-minute verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus, too self-questioning, too concerned with “will anybody like this?”, too worried about what you, the reader, may think about what I’m writing right now. And right now. On and on?
It leaves me profoundly grateful to have been given this gift of music by my imperfect father, and his father, and his, two of whom are in the picture above. It keeps me curious about what voices are hiding in every lyric I write. It gives me an unending desire to sing from a place deeper than my need to please.
Luckily we don’t have to do all of the striving and letting go alone. That’s what music, at its best, does. I can write a lyric and discover or say things about myself that I’m not able to uncover or communicate in any other way. And when someone else listens or dances along, what a satisfying, beautiful thing that is. Or I can listen to Bowie’s “Life on Mars” or John Coltrane playing “Naima” and find the comfort, joy, understanding or freedom that is so often so hard to give myself. We’re connected by melody and everything harmonizes…even when it doesn’t.
Below is a link to my great-grandfather Draper Walters (fiddle), my grandfather Ray (banjo) and my great-aunt Rose (jug) playing Shaker Ben in 1933. The Walters Family recorded at Gennett Studios. Thank you for reading, thank you for listening.
