What People Don't Get

I'm a songwriter. It's what I do. I have to. It's not a "hey, that sounds like a neat job!" thing. It's a, "If I didn't, I wouldn't know who I am" thing.

So anyhow, here's what people don't get:

MY SONGS ARE NOT ME. I AM NOT ANY ONE SONG (except maybe Optimism). IT'S NOT ALL NECESSARILY FACT. (it's called artistic license).

See, a song is just itself. Yes, it came from the writer, and maybe the writer can say "this sums me up", but once you release it, it doesn't belong to you anymore. Yes, I own it, I make money from it, but that's not what I mean. I mean you give it away to every ear who hears it, and it becomes theirs too. The only way to keep a song, to make it be completely You, is to never play it for anyone else.

I sort of realized this just now from an earlier act of bravery. I played this sweet song for some people at Cafe Gardens Sunday afternoon and they seemed all touched by it (oh my gosh it's beautiful), and I told them "I just realized that I'd never played that song in public before, so y'all are the first ever to hear it!" and they thought that was cute.

SO AT THAT MOMENT, THE SONG WAS NO LONGER IN MY POSSESSION. Humanity owns it, basically I guess.

I keep hearing this word "courage", as in, "Haylee, it takes a lot of courage to go out there and play your own songs, or to even open up your voice and hands to people." Uh, okay. It just seems like that's what I'm supposed to do. If you do something well, like perform surgery, fix a car, teach kids math, play rugby, YOU DO IT. Why is it so courageous to perform the role you naturally fill?

So there you go along, doing what what you do, and hey! the world is full of people all around you! Hi there, People! So you interact and make friends and so forth, but we all also have jobs to contribute to this greater whole we call "society", of which we are all a member, right? Cause if each person didn't do their job, it wouldn't work, right? Each of us holds up our end.

My end is the music one. All of our roles perform a function for everybody else. I like my thing that I do because it helps people feel. My best buddy Allison told me once, about which song I don't recall, "Hales, the lyrics of that song just lift out of my bones the feeling I'd never be able to say out loud."

Wow. Holy crap, I did that? I was just talking to myself at the time! I wrote that song about ME, and about THAT KID, and at the fresh time I wrote it, I felt it all the way every time I played it. So years pass, other stuff happens with other kids, and the songs still apply. THAT'S WHEN YOU KNOW THE SONG/BIRD HAS LEFT ITS MAMA'S NEST and flies around by itself singing to anyone but no one in particular, just to get out what's been trapped inside itself.

Other people take ownership of your song. It's called "interpretation". I've been told that my older, less mature songs (haha written about a very immature subject) are too specific, that writing a song should be mechanized and generalized enough so more people will buy into that because that's how you make money at songwriting! PUUUUUUUKKE! HUUUUWAAAAAHHH! COUGH COUGH COUGH. But somehow, they reach other people who say to me, "that song sums up my entire love life". Wow.

Listen man, I do it because I have to. I once asked my favorite artist of all-time, Audrey Owens, former roommate and best bud since freshman year at Jennings ground floor, why she did her art stuff. (she did drawings of lizards, birds, taught me how to put a collage together, built furniture with her dad, I mean if you can imagine some sort of far out way to spend an afternoon creating something she did it). She kind of laughed and sort of pondered the question, and said, "I do it because it pleases me, I guess. It's a really selfish thing for me, I just do it because I like doing it."

Wow.

That was a turning point for me. Someone else did her thing because she WANTED to do it, while I did what I did because I HAD to do it. WOW, it never occurred to me that I could LIKE doing it. Maybe because the stuff I wrote songs about was painful to me. I wrote songs to release pain about these feelings in my bones I couldn't get out of my mouth, just like Allison said.

So when you are good at something, and you like doing it, you're more inclined to share it. So I give it away to other people, but I don't expect everyone to be "pleased" by it. If I'm pleased, that's all there is to it. Because I know that God is pleased because THIS IS WHAT HE CREATED ME TO DO. And I'm only being true to it. And he's sent people who like what I do to reinforce this fact.

I've been in and out of love with making music soooo many times. But I guess I was ready now. Wow. I just realized the last big thing I wrote songs about was the first time I'd ever been completely open to feeling love. And ooooh I felt it, all the way. And it was great, it's been great, and will continue to be great for me, because I'm experiencing a side of love I hadn't ever seen before. My songs would be boring if I kept viewing the muse from the same old angle over and over again. And I wrote a lot of songs about it. And I think Carlie Simon was right when she said "You're so vain/you probably think this song is about you". And yeah, from a certain point of view, it is. But, I WROTE IT FOR ME. M.E. Haylee Ugh Slaughter. It was a selfish act, something I had to do for myself. It just so happens the songs are pretty dad gum good and other people like them a lot. And I keep on writing, but it's evolving, and different feelings emerge now when I play them, just like songs I wrote six years ago have turned the tables on me. I am now the jerk, the You the Singer sings to, the beguiling a-hole who carelessly broke a heart. And that's fine. I learned something. I wrote something.

BUT THOSE SONGS ARE NOT ME. And they are not about that kid anymore. Because since other people have heard them, they are about a number of people. I played "The One Comes of Age" at my BFF Dennis' Good-Luck-At-Tulane-Law-School party, and Chad & his bf laughed when I sang the line "the one you thought was smart but couldn't comprehend your famous monologues" (because Chad will go off on a tangent sometimes and his boy is all, um yeah left field). (the chorus is: "I want the One who'll take me to the sea and swim out as far as he can with me/I want the One who'll take me to the edge" So when I finished the song, Chad just said "Wow" and something about never being happier that he knows me than he did right then. I almost fell over. My highly personal song, which I wrote as generally as possible so it could be appreciated by as many people as possible (see, I still know how to craft sometimes), knocked him over.

And it is a beautiful song. :) And I honestly wrote it for other people, not just for myself. I THANK GOD for the experiences, even the ones when you publicly humiliate the One you found to love because he's just like you and he ends up rejecting you, hating your guts, sending vitriolic emails, telling everyone you're insane and a bad rugby player and intimidating his friends not to associate with you, BECAUSE THESE EXPERIENCES HAVE BROUGHT ME CLOSER TO GOD.

CLOSER TO LOVE. Because I have seen 1 Corinthians 13 with my own eyes. I know how to agape. I heard from a really neat boy I met this past weekend that love is cool, but being IN love is complete and utter B.S. He felt very strongly about this. But I said hey man, the Greeks had FOUR WORDS TO DESCRIBE LOVE, and our culture has boiled it down to one four-letter word that has this HUGE meaning - the Bible said GOD IS LOVE, and what the heck is bigger than GOD HIMSELF? Jeez. So I told him, the highest form of love is AGAPE, brotherly love, as in wishing someone well, even if they hate you, even if you've never met them and they live on the other side of the world, YOU AGAPE/LOVE THAT PERSON AND HOPE GOOD THINGS FOR THEM. BECAUSE THAT IS HOW GOD LOVES US. So that is anything but B.S. And he had to agree.

So I've been kicking around these four basic motivations we all have thing that I heard about from Kerri O'Malley, my college rugby coach/current coach of the Gainesville Hogs. She said we all do everything we do for one or more of the following: POWER, FUN, FREEDOM, OR LOVE.

I've seen my rugby career follow this pattern. Now, I see my evolution as a songwriter go this way as well.