For me, writing songs is the same process I used for writing the Café Chronicles or Waiting for Tango short stories. And since I’m sitting at Bourgeois Pig Café in Chicago and there is 20s music playing, I thought I’d talk about that process.

When I write a short story in the style of the Café Chronicles…I take that back. I think I write everything this way, including the erotic novels. Let me start over. When I write, I take a piece of what I’m experiencing, an object, a feeling, a memory, a person, and blow it up until it looks like Picasso’s “Ma Jolie.” From there, I examine all the parts until I find the few things on which I want to focus. I do this very quickly. If I wait too long or think about it too much, I start to censor. And that’s the last thing I want to do.

I should say that the first part of my song or storywriting process is not at all creative. At least it’s not creative in the way we like to think about creativity. It’s more observational. What do I see? What does it remind me of?

From there, I start writing. For example, one of my favorite short stories is simply called “The Woman in My Café” (Unpublished). The story is set in the now defunct, Saint’s Café in State College, PA. It starts with me describing the room a little. I then pull apart the muffin display case and, for me, that’s where the story takes off. I describe the muffins as little prisoners nobody wants. Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have made them puppies in a pound waiting to be adopted, but I tend to anthropomorphize objects. The point is, to me, they looked sad.

As I was looking at the muffins a woman walked in, ordered coffee, and left. The entire transaction took a minute or two, it was winter so she was completely bundled up, and she had her back to me the entire time. So, I blew her up and out of proportion and examined her. I made up an entire life for her. In fact, puppies do come into play later in the story.

The only real parts of the story were the descriptions of the walls and lighting. Though, I will still argue that the muffins looked sad.

I use that same process for writing songs. I will take something that I feel or see and delve into it. I will admit that when it came to songwriting, early on, I got a little carried away and let myself go to dark emotional places in order to really produce the emotion of the songs. This was an interesting stage in my process because I was just learning about the concept of the second arrow and how when things happen to us, the first arrow may sting a bit, but what we often do as humans is harp on how that event made us feel, and we wallow in it. That wallowing would be the second arrow. I was, essentially, stabbing myself with arrow after arrow in order to keep feeling the emotions.

The problem with, or perhaps the good thing about all the second arrows, is that they were all fictional. For example, a number of songs are about me getting hurt in a relationship. Well, the fact is that the relationship barely existed and was never a romantic relationship. Nevertheless, I held onto those emotions and kept plumbing their depths in order to write more songs. I will say that this process had a deleterious effect on my emotional well-being for a bit. I knew what I was doing, and I understood why, but it probably wasn’t the healthiest way to go about things.

Now, I can move in and out of those spaces and use them more effectively to write what I want and do so in a much healthier way. If you look at the songs, you’d assume that I’m still bullying my emotions for creative output, but now my process looks more like my short story process.

For example, one of my favorite new songs is called “Just Leave it Alone.” The opening verse goes like this:

Lying awake
Head underwater
I Turn toward the half-made bed
The memory foam
forgot your form
like you were never there

From the title, which is also the tag at the end of the chorus, and the first verse, you’d think that I’m still harping about that relationship. The title, though, comes from the name of a beer I saw at a brewery. And then, I anthropomorphized the mattress in a way that I thought was funny and evocative.

Is there still some real emotion in the song? Yes, but I’m not over here drowning in my own tears. (I hope you got it from the head underwater line. Sometimes, my metaphors are a bit of a stretch.) I wasn’t sitting in a hotel bar in Pittsburgh climbing into a bottle of bourbon just to write a song.

I’ve also started using ideas from outside my personal experience to write songs. Not long ago, I was reading a poem called “Conscience and Future Judgement” (Anonymous). I took one of the themes in the poem and combined it with the Buddhist concept of impermanence to write the song “Choices.” The process is the same. I deconstructed the poem and the concept, put pieces of myself in the mix, and wrote the song. This was fun as I went verse by verse, picked it apart, looked at it from different angles, and even borrowed words and reworked phrases from the poem as I went. If you line up my song and poem, you will see how I took the ideas and went in new directions with them.

I sat alone with my conscience,
In a place where time had ceased,
And we talked of my former living
In the land where the years increased;
And I felt I should have to answer
The question it might put to me,
And to face the question and answer
Throughout an eternity.
“Conscience and Future Judgment” (Anonymous)

I sit alone with my choices
On a Saturday night
And the clock stopped ticking
Right before my eyes
“Choices”

Again, there are bits of me in the song, but it really hangs on the poem.

For me, the process of creativity is more about observation than anything. I see the world, I see my own emotions and then simply deconstruct them and set them to music. In some ways, it is an easy process that doesn’t really adhere to the mystical ideas we have about creativity.