I have been making up songs as long as I can remember. I started writing them down, and formalizing them into product, when I was 15, and some new friends wanted to start a band, and I liked singing, right? And I said sure, and the focused effort of the next 6 years slotted into place. I stopped performing songs long before I stopped writing them down; and I still write songs in my head, so often it’s annoying, and most of them turn into jokes now because it’s easier than confronting what it would mean to take it seriously.
I don’t want to be a middle-aged man, full stop. And I especially don’t want to be one who picks up the guitar periodically, remembers what it felt like to believe that dreams mattered, strums and picks a bit before putting it down again. But lord, that’s the way I’m going; and I feel the slope steepening.
Listening to someone like Phoebe Bridgers is infuriating for me. I’m moved, but I also resent the songbird voice, the simple chord structures, the apparent ease I know she still struggles to produce. Her new album is at least half good; I liked her better before Conor Oberst sank his sonic fangs in. But I can’t listen to it without feeling both moved to write a song of my own, and then to full-blown envious disgust with myself that I have the wrong voice for what I want to sing; that I learned to be pent up and strange and still haven’t unlearned it; that hearts open readily for some voices, but I’ve always felt like mine was more crowbar than key.
we were all of us born after the end of a world.