I know I should be writing, but it’s hard to really give a shit.

It’s hard to speak objectively about something you are passionate about. For as long as I can remember, even when I was a kid, all I ever really wanted to do, was write songs. Now don’t get me wrong, I never wanted to be a “songwriter,” not in the sense that I wanted to be a brick layer or rocket scientist or garbage engineer. Making a living at writing songs or even seeing it as a vocation may have entered my mind, but it was always secondary or further down the pike. I just wanted to write songs that spoke to me or songs that I thought were good, or would hold up at least a little bit against the light of what I considered to be good songwriting.

Maybe that’s part of it: The question of “”What is good songwriting?” A folkie is going to tell you that good songwriting is having a good topic or something. A Nashville songwriter is going to tell you that a good song is one that’s crafted and honed for a particular market and that sells to publishers and hits some kind of hot button with the unwashed masses. There are tons of opinions and a million ways that folks are going to tell you “this is good” and “This is bad.” Who really cares if it moves you. Charlie Patton’s “Some De Days” is lyrically scattered, yet the power of it’s simple melody and rural lyrics is, to me at least, mesmerizing. And I’d rather write something (if only that were possible) that could hold up to that than have all the royalty pennies in the world.

As I said, it’s hard to be objective about something you that makes you passionate. I have reams of notes filled with “good” lines and hooks and ideas for songs filling up notebooks, and I still write them down and play the songwriting game in my head, but it just feels pointless. The songs that I think might actually have some value, no one really gets. They’ll dissect and chop them up into a million pieces and tell you why the gears don’t go. So should you even bother to produce art (songs) if no one thinks they are of any real worth? If you see your songs as mediocrity, is there any point in subjecting the world to it’s vapid lukewarm blandness? (Not that this seems to bother most of the world). What’s the point of writing songs if they just stay in your head or in your room or on paper or tape or digits or floating in space? Should you write or create if it only frustrates yourself to the point that you realize can’t live up to your own expectations or if when you do it doesn’t live up to the expectations of anyone else?

Sure Townes Van Zandt, quite possibly the finest of the (formerly) contemporary songwriters, had to have written some stuff that didn’t hold up to his own high expectations (I’m assuming here). But man there was some stuff that he wrote that sure hit the sweet spot. Did he write because he could or because he wanted to? Dylan didn’t get that good because he was hit by a bolt of lightning, he kept at it. But was it the process that interested him or was it the product?

I know I’ll continue to write new songs eventually. For what purpose I don’t know. I once wrote “A song that no one hears is much more than a song, it’s a prayer.” And someone else wrote “Who is there to hear? With heaven full of astronauts and the Lord on death row.” That’s enough for today. My coffee is getting cold.

My coffee’s getting cold
the whole world’s turning old
the milk swirling in my cup
fades away and turns to rust.