Feelings

Feelings are powerful things. Completely irrational and overwhelming. The thing about feelings is that you can't just read about what it's like, you can't listen to a friend's description and get a good idea - you have to FEEL it yourself and only then will you understand. I remember the first time I kissed a boy I actually really liked - it felt completely different from the regular perfunctory kiss with someone I was lukewarm about. When I experience any sort of emotion, it's STRONG, all or nothing. When I'd finally let myself fall in love, and then of course got my heart ripped out, it was the best thing that had ever happened to me because it made me a more complete human being. It allowed me to identify much more with all those songs on the radio that seemed so pathetic before. Having a broken heart isn't pathetic at all - it just deepens the human experience. To me, if you've never been hurt, you haven't really lived. It's something everyone should experience. I lived too long trying to shelter myself from it, and it didn't get me anywhere.

Artists specialize in attempting to express these crazy emotion things through their various mediums, which sucks for them, cause the general population doesn't feel as deeply as they do so their work goes unappreciated. Music is probably the most accessible of all artistic mediums, because most folks need words to tell them what a feeling is about. Most (and I'm really not trying to sound condescending) don't wander in to a museum and look at sculptures or paintings and seek to identify with shapes and colors or whatevah. Songwriters, if they want to make money at it, have to generalize their lyrics so as many people as possible can relate. This felt like prostitution at first to me, but then it occurred to me that I'm just summing up in a verse what people are feeling but don't know how to express. My friend Allison said there's some song I've written (it's sad I can't even remember which one!) that expresses emotion that oozes out of her bones but would never be able to put into words. That made me feel good. I guess it depends for me, whether I'm writing the song for my own out-letting of emotional junk or if I'm just telling a story. When I wrote "Tear After Tear", I imagined a young, naive girl who'd had her heart broken by a dashing dirtbag and made it as melodramatic and sad as possible, because that's what a good country song is. I also imagined Dolly Parton's voice the whole time cause she's beyond fabulous.

Did any of this make sense? It was kind of all over the place. Art is pretty stinking cool. I was intimidated by other mediums before (like photography, painting, sculpture, ballet, etc), because like many people, I was sure I didn't get it, that my reaction would be wrong. But any artist will tell you that all they want is a reaction, no matter what kind. It may not be what they intended, but every piece of art is meant to be thought-provoking or emotionally charged. It means what you want it to. When the artist finishes a piece and puts it out there, it belongs to everyone. Some are more protective of their work than others, but all are just funneling an idea or situation into something that makes sense for them, and if they're lucky, it might help someone else understand themselves a little bit better. All too often, we walk around frustrated and don't know why - then we hear a song or see an image that calms us a little bit because out there somewhere, someone else has felt the same way. God put us all here, billions of unique individuals, for each other, and finding common ground can be thing that makes our own battles a little easier to fight each day.