Let’s see …. how does the barre system go again? Oh, right. It’s freaking impossible. Forgot that part. Back to the banjo chords then. I wonder how good songwriters handle questions like this.
Yes, if you haven’t already guessed, I’m attempting to write some songs this week. Well, I should say one song, but that’s being somewhat generous. I can’t let Matt carry the entire burden of composing for Big Green. What kind of brother would that make me? I’ll tell you what kind. My kind, that’s what. Just STAY OUT OF IT. Anyway … that’s why I’m handling this guitar. Notice I didn’t say “playing”. That’s a bridge too far … and this song of mine doesn’t even have a bridge.
Frankly, I don’t see how Matt does it. He dreams up these songs, harmonizes them in about twenty minutes down in the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill, then tracks the suckers. Me? I get some lame idea, knock it around in my head for a couple of days, and then either the lyrics come all at once or they drop from the sky in fragments, sometimes six months, sometimes a year apart. In some instances I do songwriting at a glacial pace. You can actually watch me evolve during the course of writing a single song. (When I wrote the first verse, I was an Australopithecus. Now look at me! Definitely Peking man.}
So, if I’m treating every songwriting project like the evolutionary ascent of man, that amounts to a lot of banjo-plucking primates. And that’s where many of my songs start out. I’ll find a chair somewhere in this big old barn of a place, throw my cheap-seat Martin D-1 across my leg and start playing the five chords I know best. If I stumble upon some progression or melody worth repeating, I can’t rely on memory alone. Fortunately, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an audio recording module, and if I can get him to stand still long enough, I can capture whatever the hell it is I’m working on and play it back later. If it happens in the middle of the night, the playback sounds like …. you guessed it …. banjo-plucking primates.
Hey, we all have our process. That’s what makes us human, right? Doing dumb shit, then figuring out how to improve on a bad thing. That’s the Big Green way.
Sit out here long enough and your mind starts to light on all kinds of things. Random stuff, like … why didn’t I get some handyman to fix the roof on this shed? It leaks like a sieve! Then there are thoughts of what might have been, the kind that creep around the corner when you’re sitting idle, then climb in through your ear and squat down on your brain. Why didn’t I call that handyman? Finally, you get the occasional flash of inspiration, like you’re seeing the world for the first time. Stuff like, I want to join the Space Force! or I want Marvin to join the Space Force! One or the other of those might be workable.
Small wonder the heads on my antiquated cassette tape machine have picked up a charge; I’ve been running hours of tape through that thing as part of my summer project to archive and restore Big Green’s early recordings (1984-96) as well as some even more primordial stuff from the early 80s. Since practically all of the songs were recorded on analog audio cassette, which doesn’t hold up all that well over the decades, it’s just as well that I’m getting to this now. By the end of the process, I hope to have remastered early mixes of 150 to 200 songs, the vast majority written by my illustrious brother, Matt. That shiny tape makes for a bewildering trail (which is, in fact, pretty close to the title of one of those 200 songs).