16 June 2001
After Graduation

It's been a while, hasn't it? Good thing I never promised to keep this updated regularly...

I've signed myself up for the Berklee Songwriting Workshop in August. As with voice lessons, I've long resisted getting instruction on how to write my lyrics or my music -- it's such an intensely personal process that I find it mildly distasteful to have that process critiqued. But the kind of writer's block I've been having for the past several months feels like a curable strain of the disease; the problem seems to be a lack of training, of the ability to capture ideas and flesh them out into complete works, rather than a lack of inspiration. In particular, learning some half-methodical way of stitching words to notes would be nice. There are currently three songs on my drawing board that refuse to take lyrics, and as many sets of lyrics that won't fuse with any music. And I ruined a song in that delicate words-to-music phase recently. The piano part was pretty and the lyrics spilled out in a few minutes' time one morning, but by the time I finished fussing with their relationship to one another, the soul of it was gone. Sigh. So I am going to school. Maybe I'll be able to rescue this one someday.

Undoubtedly some of you out there are wondering if I have a Thought on the album release. It's rather like graduation, appropriately enough...you work long and hard towards it and you celebrate and then, in that weirdly anticlimactic period that follows the celebration, you wonder what you're going to do next. Everyone expects (rightfully so) that you'll take what you've gained thus far and move on to higher and brighter things, and you expect it too, but you find yourself a bit tired just now. Maybe it's a roundabout way of being nervous. The world gets a little bigger from here, if you'll let it. Things get a little harder. You may find out you aren't as good as you thought you were. And even if you are, no one's going to notice unless you get out there and show them so. You think about it all a little too hard, and the days grow cottony with summer heat, until you mostly just feel like napping.

That's often been my early summer-vacation experience, anyway. *grin*

Seriously...it's a relief to have the album out. On a practical level, it's good to see that people are buying it, so that we can climb out of the red ink we've been swimming in. It's good to have something for people to take away after I've done a good show, and to know that the record has much the same spirit as the performances. But it's also a wake-up call for me, showing me the work I have left to do -- it's only just started. ~200 CDs sold in the first few weeks, mostly by mailing list and word of mouth, certainly ain't bad for someone who's essentially unknown in the music scene. But that leaves the other 800 sitting in my living room, and there they will stay unless I get out there more. I do enjoy performing -- enjoy it more with each show, actually, which is a pleasant surprise. It's just a matter of doing the dirty work and playing agent for myself, the physical driving and walking and talking to people, signing up and showing up and following up and all the things that I'm not especially talented at or interested in doing. It's only fair that I pay my dues as musician, of course. And I intend to pay them. After this nap.

- VT