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©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

This is the last blog post.  Next week there’s a song and video, but I’m going to do the wrap-up now.

So here are some observations about the experience of being a lifelong non-songwriter who decides to write approximately one song a week for a year or so and a few questions answered in a sideways fashion.

Verdict.  I’m glad I did this.  In two weeks or a month or five years I may look back on it as a horrifying embarrassment, but I don’t think so, since (i) I don’t plan to ever look at any of this stuff again and (ii) if it was really that bad, I have faith that most people are decent enough that they will avoid mentioning it.  As indeed most people have been so far.  (I’d be more embarrassed, I think, if anybody knew how seriously I took this thing.  Or at least how seriously I took it up to a couple of weeks ago when I had my Neil-Armstrong-after-a-five-day-drunk moment:  “I walked on what?”) I know that if I had looked back very far at any point in the project I would have abandoned it.  Whether it was wise to continue is unknowable, but for now I’m calling it a success just because it is finished.  I said early on, in one of my fits of handwringing about whether to continue, that I had a habit of not finishing things once I knew they were finishable, that once I saw that something could be done, it didn’t seem necessary to actually do it.  I went through that same sort of logic when I was drinking.  I would stop for long enough to see that it was possible to stop, at which point I would start again, having, to my mind, proved something. I had proved something, of course:  I’d proved the opposite of what I thought I was proving.

Why Did I Decide To Do This? I used to write novels.  Obsessively.  I kept it a secret from most people, and I kept the extent of it secret from everybody.  The fact is, all I did was write novels (after figuring out in my early twenties that I couldn’t write short stories) for about sixteen or seventeen years.  When I got married and started working at a real job, I wrote early in the morning, late at night, at lunch (when I worked downtown, at lunch time I’d go over to the old Carnegie library, now the History Center, and sit in the lobby of that quiet old building and write in longhand.  I wrote two novels that way.) Many of them were, and are, unfinished.  Several did get finished.  My typical method was to work very hard and be very committed to the novel until it was done or until the end was in sight, be convinced it was the greatest novel ever written, send queries to fifteen agents, get the rejections back, and meanwhile decide the novel was no good and immediately start another one.  Rinse and repeat.  Each novel took one to two years.  I worked on one about a messianic placekicker for six or seven years, maybe longer.  I don’t think I ever finished it, because I finally figured out how it was going to end (it involves Buck Owens), so I didn’t need to finish it.

That’s not a healthy way to live, I determined.  Whether I have any aptitude for that line of work, whether those novels are or were any good, is not even relevant, just as whether these songs are any good is not relevant (more on that below).  The way I went about it was not any good.  This time, failing publicly somehow presented itself as a more attractive option than failing secretly.  That was part of what was behind the compulsion to write a song a week for a year.  The alternative would have been to pretend I wasn’t a guy who’d spend a year in his garage writing songs for a nutcracker doll to sing.  But I am that guy.  So now you know.

What Have I Learned? Other than what I’ve just said, nothing.  Or at least nothing jumps to mind. There are plenty of things I feel like I should have learned, some of which are things that other people are born knowing or learn early in life, but I can’t say that I’ve learned them yet.

But it’s a process, right?  The work is its own reward.  That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about, the stuff I know but haven’t . . . learned. So that’s something, I guess–knowing things but knowing you haven’t really learned them.

What Will I Do For My Next Trick? I don’t know.  The songwriting began as a stunt and then, I think, I got (sporadically) better at it.  I don’t have any burning ambition to write songs, but then again burning ambitions are something I’m trying to avoid at this age.  The attitude I took toward the songs was, “I need one a week.”  Some weeks, most probably, were nothing to celebrate.  A few have, I believe, commercial potential, and for awhile I thought I would pursue that angle, but now I know I won’t.  I’m pretty sure my songwriting days are over.  This is as far as any of this stuff goes.

But it was edifying to approach something from the standpoint of a professional, or at least a craftsman, rather than that of an artist.  I have a greater respect for craft than I did when I was kid.  Back then it was all about inspiration and passion–Whitman’s yawp and the 10,000 words a day Thomas Wolfe just couldn’t contain, just had to pour out for the benefit of posterity.  I don’t regret or disown any of that, but the priest who goes to work Sunday morning and says the exact same thing the priest across town and across the ocean is saying, well, that’s something, too.  Just going through the motions can be ennobling, too.

How Many Songs Were Left Over? A bunch!  I didn’t realize how many until I just started thumbing through the books.  But don’t worry, you’re not missing much.  There aren’t many that would have made the cut at this late stage (and, honestly, you could say that about a whole lot of them that did get used.)  I do consider it a victory that I never had to use “Quirky People.”  I would have liked to use “I Think Your Cat Pissed in My Truck,” but Chevrolet doesn’t make S-10’s anymore, which screwed up the main rhyme in the song.

What Was Left Undone? I wanted to write about Red Headed Stranger, how Willie Nelson created a thing entirely new under the sun by using scraps of stuff littered throughout his own pop cultural history, how that album exemplifies transcending the personal into the public.  I wanted to write about Merle Haggard’s perfect “Sing Me Back Home,” the strange jump backwards in the second verse that makes what would have otherwise been a sentimental prison song instead a work worthy of comparison to Chekhov. I wanted to put down everything I know about music theory, which isn’t that much but which became an early key to the universe for me; I wanted to celebrate the circle of fifths.  I wanted to write about the Rule Against Perpetuities, the only thing in law school I learned and understood better than anybody else but in a way that has no application to the law.  And I owe Fussy the story of how I got to Fayetteville and the refinement of the Tom T. Hall Principle, which I will get to her in some fashion.

What Happened to Week 50? I really don’t know.  I started reading A Wrinkle in Time to the kids last week, and I think maybe Week 50 got sucked into a tesseract.  It’ll show up somewhere, I think.  My next project might be called The Week 50 Project.

Are These Songs Any Good? They were good when they left here.  After that, I can’t say.  But there really aren’t any bad songs, only bad songwriters.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

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For the second week in a row I’m going far into the vault.  This week’s song has been on the list of contenders for over a year (written 12/08/08, my dad’s birthday and the 28^th anniversary of John Lennon’s death), but I’d pretty much decided against using it a long time ago.  It was on the list, but it was in the “last resort” category along with a lot of others.

There was something about the song I liked, but there were several problems with it.  The main one is that I suspect it sounds far too similar to a pretty well-known song by a pretty well-known musician.  (I don’t want to say which one, just to see if anybody guesses.  If you think I’ve infringed, send me an email or leave a comment.  I’ll disclose the name of the song next week.)

Second, I never had a title for it.  I was calling it “History” for purposes of putting it on a list.

Then last Thursday I was looking through the six notebooks where all the songs are scribbled, seeing if there was any case to be made for a K, U or X song, and when I saw this little piece of pseudo-Zen whimsy about man’s place in the universe or something, the title descended from the heavens and somehow completed the song.

In the year or so that the song had been hanging around, I’d never tried recording it, figuring it wouldn’t hold up.  On Thursday I gave it a shot, and this is the second or third take.  It sounds pretty good, I think, except for where I again tried to apply my cut-and-splice skills to get rid of a couple of gaffes in the performance (“Why not just re-record it?  It’s only a three-minute song!  And it doesn’t sound that hard to play!”  Because I didn’t even think I was going to use this version until I listened to it later that night in the house, and then I thought it sounded pretty good and started messing with it, etc.  But yeah, it would have been a lot faster just to re-record it.)

J.D. Salinger.  Speaking of the sound of one hand clapping and literary vaults, J.D. Salinger died last week, and now there’s talk flaring up about what might be in his literary vault; there have been rumors for nearly forty years that though he stopped publishing, he never stopped writing.

I haven’t followed the story closely since his death, but somewhere I remember seeing a rumor floated that there may be 15 novels in his trunk.  What his intentions were for those books, if the books exist, will be of interest to the literary world, and if there are instructions not to publish, his executors will be put in a pickle.  We’ll have to watch the same sort of public hand-wringing we had to watch Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dimitri go through in deciding whether to publish the unfinished novel The Original of Laura, which Nabokov pere purportedly wanted destroyed.  A lot of people weighed in publicly on whether the scholarly and literary interest in the unfinished novel should trump the author’s own stated desires.

I don’t know what my position is on that.  I’m probably on the side of doing what the living want to do.  If the dead want something done, they ought to do it when they’re alive.  Vladimir could probably still have found the strength to strike a match.  We can’t spend our lives going around wondering what the dead would have wanted.  Good grief.  Let them take out their own garbage.

But the Salinger story might be a bit different.  If he really was writing for the past forty years and just stacking up those novels in a drawer with no intent ever to show them to anybody, with no reader ever imagined, publishing those books will be close to commission of pornography, and reading them will be an act of voyeurism.  The Original of Laura, regardless of how good it is (I haven’t read it; the title sounds goofy), was at least a work that was undertaken with a reader in mind; the seeds of the artistic-social contract are there.  If Salinger was writing alone “for himself” in his room, that’s a closed circuit.  Whatever he produced will be of interest more for insight into Salinger’s psychology than for any literary merit.  That’s an important distinction.

I’ve always been interested in those sorts of questions, but they’ve been a bit more on my mind lately as the end of this project approaches.  I’d assumed that when it was done I’d just leave it there, but that’s not terribly palatable to me anymore.  First, the point of the thing was doing it, not the having done it—i.e., it was a process-oriented project, not a results-oriented project.  Second, the internet is a graveyard of abandoned blogs and websites, and I don’t really want to contribute to all the space-junk out there (you know, those 5-entry blogs that were started in January 2006 and haven’t been touched since).  Third, everything is preserved on the internet now, nothing goes away—hell, this site probably will still be out there in some cached form even after I take it offline—and I just don’t like that.  The Victorians were real bent out of shape about their perception of the burdens of the past weighing them down; well, they’d have a cow if they had to deal with the internet.  It’s enough to turn anybody into a pre-Raphaelite.  The dead ought to leave the building and take their old episodes of Flipper with them.  Exceptions will be granted on a case-by-case basis, and think twice before applying if your last name isn’t Shakespeare.  So I’ve decided I’ll take all this stuff down a couple of weeks after the last entry, say March 21, the first day of spring.  The one thing I want to preserve is the remembrance of my father-in-law from Week 7, which I’ll either leave here or ask one or more of his colleagues in Scotland to find a place for on their blogs/sites.

Video.  Those are some of Thomas’s best works, I think.  Pirates, dinosaurs, space wars, he’s got it all covered.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

It’s hard to play badly on purpose, by the way, which is why I didn’t try.  As a result, the badness sounds much more natural.  Not bothering to tune the low E string (tuned down even lower, to a D, here, though the song was recorded in F-sharp, I think) contributes to the gut-bucket atonality of the song.  It’s supposed to sound like a drunk guy.[2]  I may have overdone it.  There’d be nothing unusual in that.[3]

Norm and Carolann; the Mucky Duck.  Welcome to Houston to our newest friends Norm and Carol Ann, Glaswegians who’ve been living in San Francisco for the last several years and who are now Houstonians.  You last heard of Norm and Carol Ann a few weeks ago when we saw the Flatlanders with them.  To celebrate their arrival, Sunday night we went to the Mucky Duck, where Red Molly was playing.  The Mucky Duck has been around only twenty years but is the main venue for folk music in Houston.[4]  If you’re a national touring folk act who can sell, say, fifty to a hundred tickets but probably not 500, you’ll probably play the Mucky Duck.  It’s a lovely little pub/restaurant owned by Rusty and Nancy Andrews that serves very good food, and the three members of Red Molly, northeasterners who’d never played Houston, were touched at the generous turnout for an act that’s not very widely known down here (the reason for the turnout is probably because people trust the Andrews’s bookings.)  Red Molly’s three-part harmonies are gorgeous, all three women are first-class musicians, trading off on guitar and bass duties, and Abbie Gardner in particular plays beautiful dobro.  If they come through your town, or if anybody else comes through your town, you might as well get out of the house and go listen to them, because the internet wants you to die alone.

Updated Outlook.  I’m not going to get to all the things (advertised and unadvertised) I intended to get to.  For instance, though this is not the official surrender, I am probably not going to get to the last three letters of the alphabet (K, U and X).  Lizzy-T is not going to do her song about angry cheese-loving women.  I may not arrive at an inviolable articulation of the Tom T. Hall Relativity Principle.  Etc.  There are five more weeks after this one, and the last two are accounted for.  The next three are not (which is why I’m not officially surrendering the K, U and X songs), but I’m out of town part of this week, so next week will probably be a punt.  I’m saying all this now so I don’t have to use any space over the remaining weeks to explain what the plan is (there isn’t one), though I probably will anyway.

The Picture.  The small girl in yellow sunglasses is my sister; the two blonds are the Peterson girls, Donnett and Tiffany (on the end).  Tiffany found a bunch of old pictures and sent them to me a few weeks ago.  I include that one here, taken beside their house and their two matching gold cars in about 1975 or 1976, I’m guessing, for no particular reason.

[1] You are hereby referred to my caveat in Week 25 regarding biographical interpretation of these songs.  I can tell you that empirical tests prove that whiskey and Jackson Browne constitute the ingredients of the number one recipe for drunk-dialing, though.

[2] But that weird cacophony at the 2:43 mark, just before the last verse, is recorder error.  I momentarily forgot the last verse and stalled by playing another few measures of that chord progression, then tried cutting the extra measures out and splicing together what was left.  It worked great in that in my very first try I found precisely the place to make the cuts (not as easy as it sounds unless you know how to use a template that visually shows you where the measures are, which I do not.)  But the splice resulted in a garble, which is what you hear there.  (Yeah, that was totally worth 102 words of explanatory footnote.)

[3] I wish you could do footnotes to footnotes.

[4] Anderson Fair, the venerable Houston institution where the careers of many folk musicians first blossomed (Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Nancy Griffith, Eric Taylor, Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams and a slew of others all cut their teeth there in the seventies and eighties) is still operating, just not quite with the same vigor it had back in the day.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.