Today is dirty and luke-warm. Thick grey drops of rain fall from low grey clouds and squeeze through the large gap in-between the door and it’s frame. They land on nineteen seventies’ lino flooring that only just covers the kitchen floor with a sound like bacon slowly sizzling in a pan. I catch some on the tips of my fingers and dry it between my thumb and forefinger to see of it smells like the end of the summer. If Eskimos can have a hundred words for snow, then the English should certainly have a few more for rain, in my opinion.
Today is one of those days when I feel like I pulled the plug out of the bath tub. As the water rushes down the drain, outside a dirty little rainbow emerges in a tiny shaft of the mostly hidden morning sunlight because beauty is evident and waiting to be found in the dark places you never look. The cantankerous auditor of the day has once again constructed an elaborate joke that everyone gets – except me. I watch the kettle boil.
An undecipherable melodic idea is rattling around my head like a pea in a whistle. I know it’s in there, but, as usual, it won’t come out. It’s TV static, it’s the bright light behind a thick canopy of leaves, and it weaves like a nervous dog in front me and then backs away. I’m sometimes asked how I write songs. The truth of the matter is that quite often I write songs in this state of mind….. melancholic, tired, frustrated and staring at the kettle waiting for it to boil. Then letting it cool and waiting for it to boil again while thinking about all the things in this world that I have yet to make sense of…which is most of them.
I’m looking for a place to start. A customized line, something that has a certain kind of tone or poetry to it, a melody that battles against the feeling of frustration, or focuses the lens on a short moment of time or emotion, or pokes a shitty stick in the eye of loneliness and boredom and says…. “Here I am.” Or as Lionel puts it, ‘Hello’. A cure for these long, green, and seemingly meaningless suburban blues.
