Dan Zanes
How to Write a Metacognition

The Power of Music: Sound, Sense & Impact

Sound, Sense & Impact

 

“It goes like this the 4th, the 5th
The minor fall and the major lift...”

~Leonard Cohen,Hallelujah

 



    One might think I’d have some catchy opening line for this essay, but I am baffled for some way to begin. I just want to... As a songwriter I want to make music that rewards my listeners with something beyond the ordinary. The irony is that most people are attracted to the familiar and predictable patterns of the music they love and want to hear, so I guess I don’t want to go too outside “my” ordinary if I wish to keep my persistently paltry audience--which I do wish to keep.    

I’ve always had a rough relationship with the music of my musicianship for I am no child prodigy. My “childhood” as a guitarist started in a sparse dorm room at Fitchburg State College playing a Bob Dylan two-chord dirge and whispering the lyrics to “Hollis Brown.”  My guitar is an old pickup truck whose job is to carry whatever my voice and whatever words I force into the simple patterns of folk music.

I am not proud of the choices I made with music, for I never really learned music; I never put in the time to actually study anything more than what suited the myopic needs of my precious lyrics and the stories woven into my coarse melodies; and I have never called myself a musician--but rather a folksinger, for singing folk songs is what I do. If I need to create more polished music--true music--I rely on sidekicks, mostly Hatrack Gallagher and Seth Connelly, who join me on stage and ply their respective trade on harmonica and guitar with astonishing skills.

Why now this curiosity about music at such a ripe age? My hands and fingers are embittered and gnarled by years of labor and mistreatment. They don’t do what I want them to do; hence, I am like a lame golfer playing my rounds with a single wooden club. I swing and flail with an unnerving persistence, but somehow I sink the ball in the distant cup and go home happy. 

I write--a lot, which is a blessing and a curse. This notebook is filled with songs and poems crafted, I think, with some semblance of skill and awareness; yet, I also know the good from the bad. I know when something rises above the ordinary, and, when I am not sure, I slip them into my set while singing my shows in a small bar here in town. My friends are unswervingly honest. After forty years in the same bar in my old hometown, my humility ultimately overrules my pride. I am not afraid to let a song die an early death. I simply move on

Perhaps this is because I have not fully mastered--or even slightly mastered--the patterns of the music I create. My songs revolve around the same five or six chords that somehow hold the stories together. When I meet with success, it is as much an accident as an intentional act.  I am not however, too old to change, to adapt and to learn.

 

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