Writing Songs

My friend, Steve, and I have been making music together for 20 years. It sounds funny to say that, because it makes us sound old! But it's true. In 1988, we each bought our first electric guitars. Mine was a black cheapo I got at a pawn shop. Paid 100 dollars for it. It didn't even have a brand name (probably got painted over). I think Steve's was a Harmony that he bought at Service Merchandise. My amp was tiny and weak. But it was a start. Within a year, we had formed a true band with our friend Dom and another friend named Steve. We bought a drum set, Dom got a bass guitar...we even bought a second-hand 4-track recorder. We recorded several songs and even played live once for a talent show. It was a blast and we still chuckle about it today.

When our band (Skulk of Thieves) broke up before senior year, Steve and I continued to play music, and even took it up a notch. We auditioned for the school vocal emsemble, Breez, which included a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a keyboardist. Steve was the guitarist, and I was the bassist. Steve upgraded his guitar and amp, and I bought a new bass and amp. The cool thing about Breez is that for a class period every day we got to play our instruments. Though the music we had to play was not our favorite type of music (Wind Beneath my Wings? C'mon!) it gave us experience with our instruments as well as lots of practice playing in front of live audiences. And yes, the Citrus County Watermelon Festival counts as a live audience. And never discount the value of playing Christmas songs at a nursing home!

On the side, we played covers of the music we liked (REM, Beatles, The Cure, etc.) and wrote some tunes of our own. We called ourselves B.A.F.M., after a crude nickname for Steve's car. Alas, when we graduated from high school, Steve went back to his homeland of Scotland, and it seemed that our musical partnership would be severed. But as Lee Corso would say, not so fast, my friend! We mailed cassette tapes back and forth and continued to share our lives and our favorite music with each other. After living in the States for most of his formative years, Steve had some rough years of depression trying to adjust back to life in Scotland. Many of his early tapes expressed his frustration, and you could tell he wanted to be in the States. I think the tapes were a nice outlet for his sadness and maybe helped him make the transition. One nice result of his longing for Florida was that he came back to visit a couple of times. In those short times he returned, our musical partnership, now called Baffum, continued. We wrote a few more songs and even recorded some with his old guitar teacher.

In 1993, a few months before my wedding, I sold my bass and amp, to help finance our wedding. It was kind of sad, but I felt like it was necessary. A year after our wedding, I bought a classical guitar in Costa Rica, so at least I could continue to play.

Around 1993 or 1994, Steve and I first figured out email, which completely revolutionized our ability to keep in touch with each other. I think the onset of email, and later instant messaging, phased out our audio tapes, which had been mostly filled with discussion and small talk. And later, with the accessibility of CD burners, we just sent CDs of our favorite music to each other. Even this has now phased out, as our music has gone digital thanks to the iPod. We just email songs to each other now.

In the late 90's, the songwriting bug got us again and we sent cassette tapes back and forth, adding tracks to a few songs which we were working on. This was definitely a crude system, with each recording resulting in lower quality. But it was the best we could do at the time.

Recently, Steve has found a program called Garageband, which makes it easy to record music on the computer. So the bug has hit again. I'm in the process of buying a bass. I got a used amp this week off Craigslist. We looked through our songs from years ago and found one that we would use as a trial-run, a kickoff project for our new recording sessions. Steve sent me a rough draft track yesterday and I'm excited at the possibilities. Now I find myself working on lyrics while I'm teaching. This morning I got an idea for a new song and I've been toying around with it in my head. I have a little microphone on my computer at school, so I can record ideas that I get while I'm at work.

I shared all this with Cristina last night, and she asked me a good question: who is our intended audience? It hit me that I do it not so much for any audience, but because I love the act of creating. And I love the collaboration of working on music with Steve. We have many of the same music sensibilities, so we're a good fit. We understand each other musically like twins can understand each other's gibberish. I have no aspirations to perform live, or to make a demo CD to try to get a record deal. That's just crazy talk. We're not the most talented musicians. We don't have great equipment. But we have fun with the process. We love to surprise ourselves. We love the challenge of trying to craft a song that we really like, and the pleasure of knowing that it's ours. Writing lyrics is like writing poetry. It's hard to avoid cliches and pretentiousness and banality. And that adds to the challenge. Which is why we're so slow. The song we're working on now has been a work in progress for about 17 years! We're like the Stanley Kubrick of songwriting. We take forever to apply our craft!

Back to the matter of audience, I'm not even eager to send copies of our stuff to all my family members. It's not that I don't want my family to hear our stuff, I'm just not doing it for them. I'm doing it for me. I do get excited at the positive byproducts which will result from getting back into making music, like being a role model for my kids. They'll see that Sofia isn't the only one making music, and that their dad does it for fun and friendship. Some guys enjoy playing online games, some go bowling, some hang out and watch sports and drink beer. I like to work on songs with my buddy, my musical other-half.

I know I really love something when my sense of time dissolves. It used to happen when I'd be working on a video. I could be at the computer editing and the hours would just fly by without me being hardly aware of it. It's the same thing with music. It's a little tricky creating songs with Steve being across the ocean. But thanks to computers, it's a lot easier. The time difference is really the only obstacle now. When I get home from work, he's gone to bed. At night, when my kids are in bed and I've got some time to collaborate, he's leaving for work. But on the weekends, we can sometimes be online at the same time. And once we get fully set up with our music software, it won't matter as much. When one of us finishes a track, we'll just email the file to the other one and continue the process.

Stay tuned. When we have our first new song, I'll post it.