Thumbing the Muse

Time, man.

It's a killer.

In a different era, when I was a much different man, I was fond of telling the people around me who complained about not having enough time is this:

"Time is not something that's given. Time is something you make."

And I was right.

Still am to some degree.

But what I didn't conceive then, was what happens to you when you've spent your life making time and then you've reached the plateau. I've mastered bending time to fit my needs. Pushing out fluff and minutiae. Forcing the people who needed me to find another hero. I come first. Me me me. Write what you want on a post-it and I'll get to it when I get to it.

Then I became a dad. And time wasn't about me me me. Time suddenly became far more zen-like. Time became about the now.

Art, any art, is an open ended commitment. Sure there are some far more disciplined writers in this discipline of writing who can schedule a forty five minute writing session and then move on to the next priority, but their work is the result of craft preceding the muse, and always ends up feeling like a lesson in song-craft more than a moment of clarity.

No offense Mr. Hammerstein, I'm sure you meant well.

Moments of clarity hit with no warning. They strike with impunity and disregard of situation. The further the writer distances himself from the world around him, the more clear the signal, the more apt the writer is to capture lightening in a bottle.

The rub, of course, is that the muse exists in the world around us. Not in a tiny, one windowed studio, but in a bus and on a train, with a goat and in the rain. We exist, we observe, the moment of clarity drops like a piano on our tiny cartoon selves.

Boing!

But what immediately becomes apparent when one becomes a parent is that when lightening blasts its way out of the universe and falls into the level just above your sub-conscience

calvin

See! Right in the middle of a sentence, my son walks into the room and wants to type his name.

But what I was trying to say was that when the muse strikes, there are diapers to change. There are an infinite amount of Connect Four games to play. There are hot wheels to push around, legos to construct and let's go fly a kite.

But I embrace this. I feed off this.

"Castle Park" isn't about my experience, it's about my son's. I masterminded a way to incorporate the open ended commitment of both artistry and fatherhood in a way that allows me to be both a good father and a good songwriter.

dad mom taylor

Sorry. He wanted to type "dad" then "mom" then "taylor"

Taylor is his sixteen year old brother, which if you've been following along is the person I normally refer to as "the sixteen year-old" (Don't think I didn't miss the fact that he wanted to write "dad " first. The dripping sound is that of my heart melting)

But that's just the thing. I thought I had it made. I thought that I could have my cake, eat it, roll around in the vanilla frosting, and thumb my nose at the impossibility of writing a great album, be an awesome dad, the perfect husband, a fun blogger, great at my day job, six feet tall and a full head of hair.

I write this because of december 23rd.

It's 11:15pm.

I'm sick with the kind of cold that can only be caught from snotty little preschool noses. Calvin has a double ear infection and has been restless, but cuddly in a way that only a sick child can be. He's finally asleep and laying in his bed, breathing the soft sugary breath of christmas dreams. I look about the house and decide there's nothing I need to clean, nothing that needs picking up, nothing that can't wait till tomorrow. I tiptoe to the bathroom to strip the coffee stained clothes off my body. To brush my teeth. To blow my nose. The nightlight in the hall gives me just enough illumination to see my ghostly reflection in the bathroom mirror.

She falls.

There in my head, welling up from my sub-conscience, is the first verse.

The first verse to the song I've been laboring over for the last two months.

She's so perfect. The lyric, the melody, they both flow seamlessly into the chorus I've already imagined.

It might have taken two minutes, two hours, I don't know.

It was an unending commitment to capture her.

But I was exhausted. Baby finally to bed. Work in the morning. Restless wife warming up the covers.

I moved instinctively to my guitar, but the mirror caught my eye.

How did I get this old? How can I look so wasted? I must have lost weight, because the image was more skeleton than man. My strong body looked frail, and my normally shiny, ready for anything eyes told me the truth.

Not tonight, man.

Your life needs you tomorrow. and the next day, and the next.

Let her go.

She'll be back.

She'll come to you again.

She always does.

Get some sleep.