to make the picture more complete
frozen in the headlites
more than a little sad
where you sit
until I make sense
beautiful face
 
I think this new songwriting realization has freed me up to broaden my scope, subject matter wise. I've been living here in Brooklyn NY for the past ten years, but it's really just these latest songs that reflect this environment in a way that's different than in the past. Basically, I try to just write about what I see; not so much even how I feel about it.
A lot of the songs on the Daylight CD were written from the perspective of an observer, that's the direction my songs have taken lately. I used to believe that I could only write about my
 own personal life, from my own perspective; it took me years
to realize that the lives of the people around me are more interesting and just as real.
I wrote most of Daylight's songs during one particular, continuous stretch of time, and I think there is a definite cohesion to the CD
in terms of mood, approach, and subject because of that fact. I'm trying to string together fragments of people's lives, in an effort to come up with a picture that is complete yet open to interpretation. 		I think any opinion or slant that I might put on it is inherently there without having to put into words directly. As someone(?) once said, it seems to work better for a song to show you something than to tell you.
I feel like there is a natural mood -a mixture of emotions- that comes out in the music I am writing now that is a reflection of what is going on around me. We're living in such a complex and contradictory world and the innate cynicism and sorrow of it all is just hanging there in the air; it's palpable but it can be beautiful, too.
I also included some other kinds of songs; a bit more confessional, perhaps. There are a few older ones (She Won't Say, The Things That Show) that are a little different stylistically; both the lyrics and the melody...
When I started working with Chris Harford as the producer it taught me a lot about the power of 'less is more'. When we were doing the first HUB CD a couple of years ago one of the first things that Chris did was to shorten the songs lyrically. With a lot of them we would just drop an entire verse or bridge that we thought was at all extraneous...
I I think a lot of my older stuff was more traditional in terms of verse/chorus/bridge structure and that kind of thing, as well as being more directly personal in terms of the vantage point of the lyrics...
I think it really helped the songs in that the remaining words were more important because there were less of them.; it also gave the music a chance to say something that was not said in words. A good example of this is Two People from HUB; in the process of arranging the song we cut out all the lyrics from the 'bridge' and let Dean Ween's guitar do the talking instead. I think it makes for a more powerful and emotional musical statement.
I've been simplifying the songs in an effort to leave more to the imagination. I read something Curt Cobain said about songs, as with paintings, that a lot of times some abstraction makes for a better picture.
I used to be more of a song 'purist' in that I thought the production and the actual playing should not be used to make up for a song's inherent weaknesses. I'm not all that interested in the singer/songwriter solo acoustic thing much anymore, I do believe that a good song will stand on it's own in that way but it's really the musical interaction -the mood and production of the thing- that draws me into it; a good song can keep me there.
I took a trip to Belize last year and met a woman who told me about how her son had died of a drug overdose in Mexico a few years before and that things had gotten so bad for him that she truly felt that he was better off. Since then she had spent most of her time traveling to exotic places, seeing the world. All of this in a ten minute conversation. It's truly incredible, the things that people go through; their lives are permanently colored by these events. There's music in it.