I Used To Be A Songwriter
Then something happened, and it went away.
I used to be a songwriter. That’s not a brag. That is a fact.
I was not necessarily a good songwriter. I was no Judy Tenuta. Or Julie Brown, the one who wrote the songs for Earth Girls Are Easy. But one doesn’t have to be a good songwriter to be a songwriter. All one has to do is write songs.
And I used to write a lot of songs. I wrote them for the best reason: it was fun.
The first time I wrote a song, I was doing this playwriting thing in college. I had a writing partner, and we were collaborating on a play — but not really collaborating, in that the one had no idea what the other was doing. I’d work on the script and pass it to him, and he’d write something and pass it back to me. The script got weirder and more convoluted, and the center would not hold, but anyway, at one point, the two lovers were on the cusp of declaring their love, and then they were singing, and when I gave the script back to Seth, I told him, “It’s a musical now.” He took it in stride.
I had no idea what I was doing, which made it fun. I typed out the lyrics and hummed the melody to my boyfriend, who was a musician. I was sort of hoping he would write the music for me, but he didn’t. He showed me this little electric keyboard he had and he said, “This is the C chord.” (Klonk.) “This is the F chord.” (Klonk.) “This is the G7 chord.” (Klonk.) “Sing your song and play one of those chords. Anytime it sounds wrong, it’s time to move to one of the other chords.”
I said, “What if I need more than those three chords?”
He said, “You won’t.”
I ended up writing five songs for the play — Klonk, klonk, klonk. The first one was undoubtedly the best. It was called “Weakness.” Here’s the chorus:
Everyone has a weakness!
Everyone has a place in their heart
That if you are smart
You can use it to further personal goals!
Everyone has a weakness!
Exploitation is easy if you
Know what to do
Uncover their secrets, pluck hairs from their moles!
You can do it quickly or leave them sickly!
Everyone has a weakness! Baby!
My weakness is love!
It was a hit. David Hancock, a very brilliant playwright who would go on to win a McArthur Genius Grant, happened to be in the audience when we presented our work. He said, “This play is terrible. Throw everything out except that one song.” He was right: it was a pretty good song!
I thought, this can’t be all there is to it — klonk, klonk, klonk. Music, I knew, was much more complicated than that. There was math involved. And spelling. I had taken choir in high school; there were Latin phrases bandied about. Clefs and things. I felt like a naughty child, like I was getting away with something. I was making music, but the dumbest kind of music. It was thrilling.
When I graduated college, I moved up to Minneapolis because I’d won a Jerome Fellowship for playwriting, which turned out to be a very fancy award. All the other playwrights were much smarter than me and had earned fancy Masters degrees from schools I’d only heard about on television — your Yales, your NYUs. I was the youngest and very intimidated. I bought a toy keyboard from this used music store. I liked it because it had a button that made an elephant noise; I thought, this is how people will know the song is over. Klonk-klonk-klonk-elephant noise. I must’ve written thirty songs like this.
Here’s a sample of the songs I wrote:
I’m a pedestrian! Better than the rest-rian!
Here’s another:
I don’t know who Jerome is! And I don’t care!
Can you see my insecurities peeping out through the lyrics? It’s like a Where’s Waldo game! I wrote a lot of songs about riding the bus:
We’re Metro Council Transit Operations!
We don’t stop our work or take vacations!
It’s plain to see we love our jobs
Driving ‘round the piss-poor slobs
List’ning to their moans and their frustrations!
We’re Metro Council Transit Operations!
Cue the elephant noise. I told you I wasn’t very good.
But it was so fun! It was fun to rhyme, and it was fun to underwhelm, and it was fun to hit the button that made the elephant noise. The whole thing was absurd.
One day I was sad and the song I wrote came out like a country song, and I thought, maybe I write country songs. Country songs were great because they rewarded cleverness, and you didn’t ever have to stray from the klonk-klonk-klonk.
By this time, I was living in Chicago with my boyfriend the musician. Since I was writing country songs, I figured I should learn guitar. I wanted to learn electric guitar — get one that was some ridiculous color, or had flames on it. They were easier to play, and you could make them nice and loud by turning the dial on the amp. My boyfriend grimaced. “You don’t want to be one of those jag-offs who only can play electric guitar,” he said. “Learn acoustic guitar, then you can always move to electric guitar later.”
So I got a nice, respectable guitar. There are good guitars and bad guitars, and it was important to my boyfriend that I do this thing properly. Mine was a pretty good guitar. It was brown.
I had a hard time with it. He showed me the C, F and G chords on the guitar so I could play all my songs. The F chord on the guitar is notoriously difficult, but it was one of the first chords I learned because I wanted to play my own songs. I learned a bunch of other chords too — D, and A, and A minor. I learned that klonk-klonk-klonk was actually I-IV-V, and armed with these roman numerals, I could play just about anything. Add a little minor-sixth chord in there — the iv — and I could play just about the entire pop and country catalog. I could transpose, more or less, and just klang-klang-klang on the guitar or klonk-klonk-klonk on the keys until it sounded right.
But I hit a ceiling. My fingers turned gray, as they will, and they got all calloused, as they will, but I couldn’t seem to get any better. “The next thing to learn is bar chords,” said my boyfriend, but I was stymied. I could barely get a clean sound out of these regular chords.
I took guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music, but it didn’t help. We mostly just strummed along to Warren Zevon songs, but I didn’t want to play Warren Zevon. I wanted to play my songs, but my teacher didn’t know any of those.
I tried switching to banjo — maybe an open tuning would be easier, because then it’s one less chord form I’d have to learn. But banjo was complicated in other ways. Then I tried harmonica, since I wouldn’t have to learn any chord forms. But no. I briefly considered the didgeridoo, but I’d run out of money for lessons.
But I kept writing songs, and by this time my boyfriend and I had formed a honkytonk band called Hillbilly Pretty, so named because that’s how a casting director described me one time, and I thought that was hilarious. He would play guitar and I would sing, and we had another couple play bass and lap steel. Our big hit was this song I wrote called, “(When I Get Drunk) It’s Time To Go Home.” It was cute, and a little naughty, and we sang these tight harmonies and tens of people liked it.
I had a cheatin’ song about some guy with a mistress named Helen:
If it’s love you want, go to Helen!
That one was pretty good; it had a nice pun.
Whenever I’d get stuck on which chord to klonk or klang, my boyfriend would help me out, but mostly I was on my own. These were my songs, for better or worse. I didn’t know the difference between Am7 and AM7, but I knew there was a difference, so that’s something.
My boyfriend had opinions, which I accepted at face value: tabs were for people who couldn’t read music, and it was better to be a person who could read music. Jazz music after 1960 was interesting only intellectually. An acoustic guitar doesn’t need a pickup, Megan, just use a second mic. Don’t waste your money on pickups.
I got accepted into the graduate playwriting program at UT-Austin, but I was conflicted. The first week of school coincided with my band’s biggest gig to date: we were going to open for Robbie Fulks at the California Clipper, a little dive bar we frequented. Robbie Fulks was and remains alt-country royalty in Chicago and beyond, and I was very eager to play for him. He wrote good songs, real songs, that were biting and hilarious and raw and exhilarating. It occurs to me only now that I could’ve said I would be a few days late to school and played the gig, but “late to school” was a foreign concept. I felt like I had to make a choice between music and theatre.
I chose theatre.
But I chose it in Austin, which is the live music capital of the world. My boyfriend, who was now my husband, would have something to do while I studied, a grad school of his own. In our three years there, he played in something like eleven different bands, every style, every instrument, big and small. I tried to teach myself Finale.
Finale was this music notation software that was very complicated, but could print out sheet music that looked official. When I typed my songs in there, it gave them a patina of dignity they didn’t deserve. I was trying to learn how to write music without knowing how to play music. It went about as well as you can imagine.
I wrote two musicals in grad school — pardon me, plays with music. One was good, one was terrible. Pretty good odds! The good one went onto win some awards in New York, including a songwriting award, which was ridiculous. My dirty secret was I’d only managed the melody line and the chords, what they call a lead sheet. I’d never managed to figure out counterpoint or accompaniment. I was not a composer. I was a songwriter.
Whenever the play would get produced, my secret would come out. A music director would get hired, and I would shamefacedly sing what I had in mind to him (always a him), and he would concoct something, and I would nod eagerly at whatever he said, because what did I know? What gave me the right to have opinions? I was an imposter.
I took a summer job teaching at a performing arts camp, and they were having a composer’s workshop at the end of the summer. I asked if I could take part. The very nice man who was arranging things listened to my tape and gently suggested I didn’t have “the chops,” but I could serve as his assistant and be a fly on the wall. I accepted gratefully. The other composers flew up and down their piano keyboards. There were shifts and modal somethings, and they all knew the difference between Am7 and AM7. A couple of their songs were even pretty good! Not particularly funny, though.
This world was not for me. I couldn’t give a shit about Am7. I stopped writing musicals.
Then I wrote the best thing I’ve maybe ever written in my whole life. I decided, on a whim, to make an entire album of pop songs about the television show, Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
I recorded the whole thing in my basement using Garageband, and I orchestrated almost the entire thing using prerecorded loops that came with my MacBook. Loops are little snippets of music — a piano riff, a bass line — and Garageband lets you transpose the key up and down, and string them together like little beads. It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of klonk-klonk-klonk.
I wrote nine songs. My husband wrote the tenth. His is the most musically complex, and the least funny.
Not all the songs have aged well. That’s a risk with comedy, especially comedy about a TV show. One of the songs is just rhymes. A few of the songs require a deep, molecular knowledge of the incidental characters of Buffy. Take the opening number:
He’s got a firm hand! A soft heart!
Kinda wish D’Hoffryn was my boyfriend!
Personal philosophy that rivals Sartre!
Kinda wish D’Hoffryn was my boyfriend!
That’s a whole song about a demon that’s in maybe six episodes over the whole series. But true fans know what I mean.
There’s a song about Buffy’s stuffed animal, a pig named Mr. Gordo, who’s mentioned maybe three times in the whole show. Here is a video of me singing it:
This video was from my one and only concert. A friend who was trying to fill up some programming at a venue downtown asked me to sing some of my songs, and then they showed the musical episode of the show, and people wore costumes, and the whole thing was great fun. I somehow managed to pull together a ten-piece band, complete with backup dancers, and it was amazing.
When I watch the video from that night, I’m struck by a few observations:
I was thirty-six years old and at the height of my hotness powers.
That was the first, only, and best time I’ve ever worn leather pants. Buffy gave me permission.
It is clear that I am having a total blast.
That was in 2010. After that, things started to go wrong.
The gig was such a success, they asked me to do a Firefly night. I liked Firefly, right? I did. But they couldn’t pay me; I had made my money the first time by selling CDs. So if I wanted to do the gig and get paid, I’d need a CD to sell.
Do you know how hard it is to write ten songs about a show that only lasted fourteen episodes? A show that I liked, but didn’t love?
I was beleaguered with problems from the beginning: my timeline was too tight; I kept getting laryngitis while trying to record, so I kept changing the keys to make it sing-able; and the worst thing, a revelation: I had nothing to say. But I’m a working artist, which means I’ll suffer just about any humiliation if there’s money in it.
We got the band back together. We played the four best songs. I was tight and nervous and I didn’t have any fun at all. I sold some CDs, which I now regret. I wish I could scoop up every copy and bury them in a landfill somewhere. Whenever I hear those songs, I cringe. It’s the soundtrack to my failure.
But, hey. That’s show biz. It’s not like they were my first bad songs. But somewhere along the line, I had developed opinions of my own. I had standards. What a mistake! But what can you do? When all my songs were dumb, I was free. Once I started giving a shit, I got trapped.
I wrote two more songs, before the music went out of me completely.
I was writing a play that took as its premise, what if Elton John and Usher were secretly best friends? It was a road comedy, and I wrote three songs for it, which were parodies of Elton and Usher’s music. The big number was a “Rocketman”-esque song called “Astronaut Fever,” and I imagined the actor playing the Elton character flying through the air via dazzling theatre magic.
I labored over these songs. I’m talking sweat. Multiple demos with multiple singers. Heart and soul stuff. I tried, man. I really tried.
I had a reading at a theatre in Baltimore, and it became obvious immediately that the songs were superfluous. This is the kind of thing that regularly happens in development workshops — the part of the play you labor over turns out to be the first thing you cut. The songs weren’t carrying any dramatic action and were just slowing down the show. Okay, out they go. No problem.
Except one guy in the audience, an artist who I adored and hoped to entice with this reading to do the show, said this to me:
“These songs make me think the songwriter doesn’t have any talent.”
That’s the shape of a knife, if you’re wondering. That’s what a knife looks like in sentence form.
He was just being honest. He was offering it to me in good faith. He was doing me a favor!
It lacerated me. It severed whatever part of me had music in it. Clean as a blade. I had music, and then I didn’t.
That was 2012. I haven’t written a song since.
Look, I’m a dramatist: I know how this third act is supposed to go. I get my confidence back! I say, phooey on that guy! I free myself through the power of song!
But here’s what happens instead: I pick up a guitar, and I can barely remember the chords. I sit down at the keyboard, give a halfhearted klonk, then nothing.
When I went through my divorce, I got the guitar out, figuring, maybe this’ll kickstart things. Maybe this terrible agony will light the fire again. After all, I wrote some of my best songs when I was mad, or sad, or frustrated. Maybe the music will flow out of me, along with all my tears.
Nothing. I can’t even rhyme properly.
I don’t really act anymore, but I agreed to play a role in a friend’s production of Company. I dutifully recited all my Bobby-babies, but discovered that I would get a tremendous pain in my right buttock whenever I sang. That’s where the knife went in, I guess. I kept my music in my butt cheek. (It explains a lot, actually.)
I took singing lessons. Trying to find my way in. Nothing.
“Just try! Just sit down and try!”
I’m an artist. I know how it works. I write plays, I write jokes, I write essays like this. I know about trying. I know about butt-in-chair. I know about grinding it out until you find it.
What I don’t know how to do is make the music come back.
I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the fun. I need to find a way to make it fun again. To make it dumb. My Buffy album is very dumb, and very fun, and it gives me great joy to this day.
I don’t need to write songs professionally. I don’t even need to write good songs. I just want the bluebird to fly through the window once more. I’ve thrown open the sash, I’ve poured birdseed on the table. It won’t come.
So last week I took a drastic measure. I bought a ukulele.
I had resisted the uke for some time, although it seems like an obvious choice for me. There was that period of white girls singing comic songs on the ukulele, and I didn’t want to be seen as stealing somebody else’s act. The world already had Garfunkel and Oates.
But I’ve changed my mind about it for a few reasons. One is, I’m old now. I’m forty-five, decidedly middle-aged. There’s no stereotype about middle-aged ladies with ukuleles, to my knowledge.
Two, who gives a shit if it’s a cliché? Caring about things like avoiding clichés got me into this twist in the first place. Embrace the cliché! Why not? How much lower can I go? What’s the worst that will happen, I’ll continue to not make music anymore?
I bought a Cordoba concert ukulele, which has a not-annoying sound and is a good size for me. I bought it with the pickup. I enjoyed wasting my money.
And it’s so fun! The easiest chord to play is a C, which is the first chord I ever learned. The nylon strings are soft and comfortable. The neck is inviting. The curves nestle into my soft body like a newborn. It’s a very forgiving instrument, and I need forgiveness. I’ve already learned all four chords.
My new husband only wants to please me, which is a trait I highly recommend in husbands. I played my four-chord version “Crocodile Rock” for him, omitting Elton’s fancier turns, and he was so proud. He wanted to introduce me to some dazzling Hawaiian soloist he knows, but I flatly refused. The last thing I need is a measuring stick.
When you write with reckless abandon, the thing you’re abandoning is your standards.
I hope I write something dumb someday. I hope I write something stupid and hilarious. But it’s like falling in love: you can’t force it. You just have to open the window and wait. And in the meantime, fuck around with some chords.
Elephant noise.
