I'm right for the first time

Another day, another dolla', another song you'll forget about by tamarra...


rats were comrades - mp3

Songs, right now, seem so disposable. They're all little moments in time, corners of our (songwriters) brains that, for better or worse, make it out to the public realm. There's no quality control. You've got enough gigabytes (or jigawatts, depending on your operating system) to soak up and archive these sounds, the music is shared, fuck... it's free, so take it. It's all too easy! And I love it.

Bob Pollard famously said that he can sit on the toilet and write five songs, and three of them would be good. You either run with the pack that believes in that philosophy or you don't. The writing process can be fast. Sometimes it drags and gnaws at you where each line of lyrics takes a day to write. A month later you've got a pretty average song that you killed yourself over. But, at least you completed it. This is the key: completion. Finish what you started. I've struggled with this concept in all areas of my life. But I'm working to get better. I've been seeing progress.

Joe Ziemba showed me how to operate a 4-track recorder in 1995. That was ten years ago. Once I started recording songs, I couldn't stop, so you do the math. It has probably been one of the most fabulous realizations ever for me, the fact that I can be so self-sufficient. It really works with my personality of only involving the bare minimum of variables in a process. And cutting the fat off has been a key strategy of mine, specifically over the past two years.

Take my songs with a grain of salt. Put it in your iTunes and let it live with the others. Hopefully, it'll come up on random right between Devin Davis and The Like Young. And for three minutes I'll be bouncing around your room, or your head. And if you picture me singing this song, imagine me with long-stemmed flowers hanging out of my back pocket and a can of spray-paint in my hand, walking down Ashland late in the afternoon when it's barely raining, right in that perfect hour when the sky gets tired before the evening sets in, it's all so dramatic, isn't it?