Serious Music

(Short Memoir) Some people don’t like it when I tell them the first song I wrote was a joke.

Me (L) & K. (R) by J. (circa 2007)

Some people don’t like it when I tell them the first song I wrote was a joke. My friend K. had recently picked up the banjo and I’d been writing poetry as a hobby for several years, so our folk ballad about bounty hunting Clint Eastwood and subsequently sleeping with him came together effortlessly one evening as we participated in the great American past time of underage drinking with our close circle of friends. I knew enough guitar from the few weeks I’d spent learning “Wonderwall” in the eighth grade to play rhythm while she finger picked. We sang in harmony and laughed until we cried.

When we played the song for others, people took it seriously. I didn’t know if it was because I often looked serious at that age or because of how hard I had to concentrate to pull off something as difficult as playing the guitar and singing at the same time when I didn’t really know how to play the guitar.

K. & I playing “Clint Eastwood” at North Light Books (circa 2007)

K.’s mom was so serious she encouraged us to copyright the song. I went ahead and did a “poor man’s copyright” which involved making a recording, sealing it in an envelope, and mailing it to myself. After I did this, I considered it done and dusted. I liked playing with K. for fun, but I didn’t have any intentions with music at that time. I had participated in school band and musical theater for most of my life, but I didn’t dream of being a songwriter.

Then one day a film student at our community college (who inspired the main character in my short story Who Drinks the Juice?) saw us playing on the lawn and asked if he could film us for a class project. He was taken by our performance and so was everyone we showed the video to. I remember my mom telling me she had sent the video to my grandma, and my grandma thought I sounded like Joan Baez. I thought it was strange no one seemed to get the joke, but now when I watch the video, I get it.

The positive feedback encouraged me to start writing songs on my own. I’d often sit on the porch at my boyfriend’s house and strum his guitar. Lyrics came easily because I’d been writing poetry using rhyming quatrains for some time, and I was guided in-part by some words my high school theater teacher said to me the previous year. “You can’t make money writing poetry,” he said, “but you have an advantage, you’re a musician. If you can learn to use music as a vehicle for your poetry you might have a better chance of making it work.”

Sketch of me playing my boyfriend’s guitar by my boyfriend (circa 2007)

On my sixteenth birthday, my boyfriend’s mom gifted me an acoustic guitar that had been sitting in a friend’s closet for many years. It made my fingers bleed when I played it. It felt terrible. It sounded terrible. I played and sang with my sister at her senior recital and did a terrible job. I was convinced I would never play the guitar well. Then one day another musician asked to play it and told me the neck was warped beyond repair, the action was unplayable, and the best place for that guitar was in the dumpster.

I moved on to other mediocre instruments, like a free piano I got on Craigslist that was only tunable to a quarter step below concert. I also moved on from my high school sweetheart and met someone at the community college I was attending who had a guitar he never played. So he let me borrow it. I started writing my first serious song, “Old River”, on that guitar in 2009.

Sketch of me playing another boyfriend’s guitar by my boyfriend (circa 2009)

I started playing my songs at open mics. They were generally not funny, though sometimes tongue-in-cheek. When one of the other musicians found out I also played saxophone, he invited me to jam with the Mexican indie rock band he had just started. When I told other musicians about it I was invited to play in another band, and then another. I quickly started getting paid to play gigs and what my theater teacher had told me about music being a more viable option for a career seemed true. I started to pursue music more seriously.

“You can’t make money writing poetry,” my teacher said, “but you have an advantage, you’re a musician. If you can learn to use music as a vehicle for your poetry you might have a better chance of making it work.”

Though I am proud of my accomplishments, including producing an EP and album of original work, it has been incredibly difficult to make a living as a professional musician. Despite my best efforts, the pursuit of it has left me burnt out and generally averse to something I used to think was a lot of fun. For the last few years I’ve been taking a break to focus on other kinds of creative writing. I figure if I’m not going to make a living in the arts, I might as well not make a living doing what I love the most.

There’s a joke I tell people sometimes that I didn’t intend as a joke the first time I said it: “I wanted to be a poet, but people kept telling me you can’t make any money at that, so I became a musician instead.”

The joke’s on me, I guess.

Thanks for reading!