getting high on my own supply - 8. "dear abby"
episode 8 - "dear abby" (summer 2007)
i missed a day of these emails last week because we went to see clairo again wednesday night and got home late. deborah, who is doing a comic a day, did two the next day to make up, but i was lazy about that and happy to be lazy, to know that it does not really matter if and when i write. for a long time, my internal identity was completely based around being a writer and so the idea of spending time not writing was bad. i don't really feel any nostalgia for that way of living, but obviously i still like writing and want to write and beyond the satisfaction of placing things in other people's brains, the act of writing regularly (what i would call dailyish*) places my brain in the kind of state that i want it to be in.
this newsletter was initially built around the very rigid formal device of starting every sentence with "i'm thankful" and while that was in part a homage to joe brainard's i remember and in part because i had read about gratitude practice being a thing that actually does help people be empirically happier, it was mostly because that device seemed like it made it easy for me to write every day regardless of whether i felt like it; that because i limited the potential of what any given sentence could be by making them all start the same way, it meant that i could more reliably sit down and slip back into the rhythm of producing, which was worth more to me than ever writing something "real" and "finished" again (still is).
i grew up in a family where my mom read the local newspaper every day and when this song was written and recorded, i was newly back at home with my parents, on the way to my future but in a holding pattern waiting for a visa and not really trying very hard to learn japanese. not having a job or any real responsibility beyond walking the dog and helping my mom prepare the house when the realtor had a showing, so i was definitely reading the paper. this song, "dear abby," takes the american daily advice columnist "dear abby" and imagines a character who is writing to her because his lover has left and he's an alcoholic and...i guess...he really likes reading her newspaper column and idealizes her and thinks that if she plucks him from the pile and answers his letter, that will fix him (also he is an alcoholic). i don't know, man, as i wrote in the contemporaneous release notes:
none of my songs are about anything. i would really like to invent a language like that guy in sigur ros because i hate writing song lyrics and then i could just sing bullshit and people would think it meant something. but then that is not that different from what i do now.
the subject matter and weird affectations to the vocal (the "swimming laps in booze" sounds almost like a jimmy stewart parody) notwithstanding, i like some of the energy of this song, the way the guitars in the bridge gallop forward out of the verse and then half time skank arm in arm with the piano bass notes (i think in some ways it now reminds me of "martha my dear", a beatles song i'm sure i had heard but did not really know well at the time because i didn't have a copy of the white album), the different flavors of backing vocals, the clearmountain pauses, the gratuitous major key solo (where the melody line being played duets with the vocals, a Queen gesture that you will find i have trouble resisting). there is probably more i could say or say better but it has already been two hours and i'm ready to send the email, see you again tomorrow(ish).
*(which in my mind roughly translates to: it's always okay to skip a day or two or three for any reason at all even and especially "fuck rules", but if you skip longer than that, it will be harder to come back, so try not to, and if you're in a streak or want to push yourself, you should try to sustain that as long as it on balance is making you more happy than what it costs you to do it, and if you're in a drought then try to capture sparks wherever they might exist and be less self-critical ([bonus]: two recent newsletters on process and practice: (lena moses-schmitt and tyler coates))