Monthly Archive for April, 2008

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Music

“Well it goes like this: the Fourth, the Fifth, the Minor fall and the Major lift…”
Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

It really does, actually – it goes just like that. When Cohen (or Buckley if you prefer) hits that melody it goes F (the fourth to C Major), the fifth (G), the minor fall (Am) and the Major lift (back to F major). When Buckley plays it he capos the 5th fret, keying the open to A D G C E A, which Buckley plays like G to Em, but actually comes out in C to Am so that his version keys as Cohen’s, though Buckley uses the higher sounds of the upper strings and some work in the progression to make the song sound very different.

When I started taking Adderall for my ADHD, it was a lot like taking off glasses you’ve been wearing your entire life, ones that have never been washed and look like building windows from a David Fincher movie. Not only was I able to get work done better, sit for longer periods, but I actually considered that I might really be able to pull off going back to college. There was one other thing I hadn’t expected though. I had picked up my guitar, as I do just about every day and was noodling about when I started playing a finger exercise, one of those that helps your dexterity and gets you scale and improvisation positions more into muscle memory and all that. See, I used to do these every now and then, maybe two or three times before I would play something else. At the point I looked up I’d been doing it for around an hour and was barely thinking about it. I thought it amusing, put the guitar down and went about my day.

By a week of doing this instead of running the same songs over and over I had to learn new exercises because the others became too easy. I started working on scales again, harmonic minors, major modes and all that. By a month I was playing progressions that I had considered to be out of my league. By the time Cassie and I split I was putting together chords that I didn’t think my fingers would make.

Now I’m sight reading for the first time since I was in choir when I was 12, working on sweeps and jazz progressions and picking up new material by the hour. Aside from that I’m able to tell you why the chords work here and not there and whip a solo with some accuracy even over some of the stuff I hear in KNTU. I started readin Berklee Press’s Modern Method for Guitar and deciphered the theory material in several of the books. It’s like having been telling stories your whole life as an illiterate, then suddenly learning to read and write.

It’s entirely possible that my love of music sits on par with my love of literature: my digital music collection alone exceeds 35,000 tracks in all genres – it took me 25 double-layer DVDs to back it up last week. I love the stuff, I consider it among man’s greatest achievements. I suppose it goes well with literature as well – both exist to evoke emotions in the listener/reader and, often, to tell a story. I started memorizing songs when I was two – I’ve always had a big thing for it, but I never thought I might really do anything with it. Over the years my tastes shift in favorites here and there, but it all comes back to a love of the form itself, from the Beethoven’s 9th to Fat Boy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, from N.W.A.’s Gangsta, Gangsta to Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, from Operation Ivy’s The Crowd to Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss to Build a Dream On…I could go on for months according to my playlist. Right now it’s Joe Cocker on the speakers, wailing a gritty voice that seems like it barely could belong to him through I Shall Be Released.

I’ve begun treating the guitar as though I’m starting from the beginning, working through all the scales and chord formations in order with the theory and the actual notes on the staff. It’s hard as hell, honestly, especially when I already know a ton of ways to play the C Major scale, but when I turn a page and can count through a few measures without missing a note it hits something inside – it’s like learning to read again and there are some of you out there who know exactly what I mean by that.

Well I’ve done a lot on this page tonight, but I’ll leave you with something to listen to: both versions of Hallelujah that I spoke of in the beginning. Enjoy.

Leonard Cohen’s Original (for Faith)

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Jeff Buckley’s Cover (for Love)

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Cleaning it Up

Well, granted, it is a personal website/blog and whatnot, but all in all it’s not LiveJournal. See, one prima reason I deleted my LiveJournal was due to no small amount of disgust I found when reading some of the whiny, angst-ridden crap I wrote a few years back. If you think I let the Panic Rat out a few days ago, well, I had enough to satisfy NIMH for a year back then. At any rate, some of that material just doesn’t fit with what I’m going on with here so I’ve cleaned it out – I plan to get writing on a bit more of a note that befits more of how I feel on a regular basis, rather than how I feel on an anxiety run.

Panic Rat

“Clay felt a panic-rat inside his mind, ready to burst free of the flimsy cage that held it and start gnawing anything it could get at with its sharp little teeth. If he could make sure Johnny and Sharon were okay, he could keep the rat in its cage and plan what to do next. But if he did something stupid, he wouldn’t be able to help anyone. In fact, he would make things worse for the people here.”

– Stephen King, Cell

I think I mention this one a lot, particularly as of late, so I thought I might give some insight into where it’s from. It comes from Cell, and also a bit from Gerald’s Game, both by Stephen King. Honestly, I wasn’t as big a fan of Cell as I was of his other works – it was a good read, but it didn’t capture me the way It or The Stand did. I did particularly like the metaphor of the Panic-Rat though, it seems to fit so well.

See, rats are intelligent creatures and they can get through just about anything, given the time and motivation. They get what they want. What the Panic-Rat (Rattus Solicitudo) wants, generally all the time, in anxiety: it feeds on not just the negative, but the overwhelming self-destruction of the mind. Once you have one and it gets loose, rationality and any amount of common sense tend to give way to the worst thoughts, spinning in a loop at breakneck speeds. You go from calm or generally alright to a wreck in seconds.

This is the metaphorical animal that I’ve been dealing with and I was thinking about it a lot today. The little bastard has a tendency to leave you severely drained and feeling often entirely remorseful, stupid or shamed. That pretty much sums it up. I figured if I was going to use the little bastard to explain things over and over again I should explain it – not as though you probably couldn’t glean it by context.

The real truth of the matter is, I let the little bastard drive the other day and, as I might have guessed, he wrapped be right around a tree. He always drives angry, after all. I was doing relatively alright, working on things, learning music theory, modes, triads and tons of stuff I never thought I would understand and the next thing I know I’m acting like a loony freaking out. To some degree I suppose I can be defended, but all-in-all I’m not particularly happy, to say the least, when I act that way. I can’t defend myself, I’ve made a point to attempt not to act in such a way. For those of you who read this and think that Cassie is strung out with a new guy every night and heroin needles hanging out of her arm, it isn’t so. I overreacted to a massive degree as I am oft wont to do. I wish I could say I don’t get like that, but I do. So she has my apologies if she still reads this at all – this is the perfect example really of why I cut things off: I try to avoid situations where I am likely to act like a crazy off the meds.

It sort of came into perspective to a massive degree this morning when I woke up, half-asleep and happened to have a look at her livejournal, where she had posted a poem written for her Creative writing class about lovers, which, in the end, refers to authors and books – it’s an amazing poem worthy of praise and with gorgeous emotion, especially if you’re a bibliophile like a lot of us. This, or course, coming from a girl who swears up and down she possesses no skill for creative writing other than enough understanding of literature to formulate a proper story. If you still believe you have no skill, I think you’ve proved yourself wrong. At any rate, reading the poem I became panicky, jealous and otherwise idiotic – until I realized what it was about, at which point I felt quite the fool. I read it over a bit more and loved it deeply.

I won’t post the poem here – it’s not my work, but (without apologies – this deserves to be read) – I’ll link you to it:

Love is at its truest…when?

If she really wants it off this page I’ll remove it, but, as I said, it deserves to be read. Good poetry just doesn’t come around often anymore. I’m a fan of Yeats, Eliot, Browning and the like, but a lot of the stuff in my age range too often resembles the lyrics to an Emo song.

So there it is, the panic rat. I’ll lock the little bastard back in his cage and refrain from the psychosis for a while, I think. Enough is enough, after all. Perhaps I’ll try to record that song I keep talking about.