A Summit and A Song

Get to the top Week 5 of SONG CAMP

SONG CAMP is a spring digital songwriting intensive over 6 weeks. WE ARE CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN, AND WRITING SOME SONGS. TOGETHER. We won’t be the same when we come back. A trip into the wilderness always changes us. We’ll explore and unite two practices, music and writing, and make something that combines them both.

We packed our bag and gathered our tools. We got walking and started collecting observations. We made our first camp and explored space and rest. We went above the treeline. We are FIVE weeks in. Today we head for the summit.

Summit.

It’s a place you want to get to. It’s also the thing you have to do to get there. It’s the reason we make the journey, and the place we spend the least time. Often, the last part of a mountain is a bit of a push. You’ve come a long way. You’re tired. You’re just putting one foot in front of the other.

If the elements are aligned, you’ll come up over that crest and look out from the highest point in every direction.

Sometimes it’s euphoric. A slow building elation: seeing rainbows form around the shadow of the mountain, taking in a quiet that settles next to your bones.

Sometimes it’s fucking freezing and you just want to get back out of the wind.

Either way, there is this moment when you are up there above the day-to-day. Most people don’t get to experience such an embodied poetic, and it’s a privilege.

I spent my twenties chasing that feeling, climbing and scrambling every peak I could get up. I am in my 40’s now, and I have paid for that perspective with some deeper sun damage than I wish I had, but I will always need to get myself up high where I can see into the distance with a body that is tired just enough to let the edges of who I think I am get blurry. I’m after that slightly altered state of joy carnate.

When you are writing a song, there is always a point where you need to just stop and write the song. You use the skills, tools, and observations you currently have, and you just have to make it. You have to rouse the inspiration and push through from idea to actual thing in the real world.

I’m most often held up when I’m :

1. Stacking too many ideas without developing them.

2. Have an idea I love a little too much.

Both of these are ways to be stuck in the “potential” of a piece, which makes it hard to pull it through and make choices that will inevitably cut off other possibilities for that idea.

The good news is that songs are much more malleable than, say, a painting. Music is an art that works with time. It has to be created anew every time anyway, but to play with it beyond a promise, it has to take a form.

When you summit a big mountain, you usually get up in the middle of the night and go as fast as you can, because you need to be headed back down before the sun gets too high. The tops of mountains are dangerous during the day when ice is melting and breaking off in refrigerator-sized chunks.

When I try to take a song from idea to life, it’s similar. I try to write it fast. I do it in a push.

Once I have the hook and the form, I try to fill it out into at least two verses and a chorus. I keep a loose grip, but I do apply some press. When the elements align, you are standing there with a song, looking out over your day-to-day, just like on that mountain.

I sure do love you all, Jes

SONG CAMP ZOOM MEETING

Wednesday, May 28 at 12 Eastern Time (paid subscribers)

Let’s get together on Zoom and talk SONGS! Ask me anything and get feedback on your song! LINK is below: