Experience into Art (with songs and a flood update)

So I posted the Flood Update a while back. In between finding a more stable place to spend our exile from home, talking to FEMA (I feel like I have a close personal relationship with a government agency), trying to have half a normal life (getting the kid to school, getting myself to work, helping my spouse  get ready for a major trip she had planned for this month and remembering to occasionally change my t-shirt), and checking social networking to get news about home and friends, I actually had some time to write a bit.

I think I heard Bruce Cockburn talk quite a few years ago about responding to tragedy with art. His comment was something like, “we are initially stunned, and we think ‘what’s the point,’ but eventually we just go back to work, because it’s the only thing we can do to respond.” Which I now find to be true. There have been all sorts of benefit shows and such, but the demands of my life are challenging enough right now that I haven’t put much energy towards those things.

But picking up the guitar, or a pen, has been wonderfully soothing, and I think helps with the healing quite a bit. So I’ve written a bunch of songs, for better or worse (I’m sure I’m not the only songwriter who feels that strange combination of anxiety and ambivalence at his own work). Begging forgiveness for the technical qualities (I’m recording on the phone), here is one of several new songs.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/115190863″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

I need to give a shout out to my friend Carole, who told me I had to write a song with that title. She was working on a piece of writing in response to the flooding, and asked me to read it for her before it went live. We had an interesting discussion about how humans respond to natural events, and I made a crack about how “the river doesn’t care” is a great line in a song, but you can’t make a whole song out of it. Carole told me I had to try. So there you go. Thanks for the push.

On a practical note, it sounds like we will be back in our house by Thanksgiving. Maybe much sooner. The more hopeful prognostications are great, but every time getting home looks closer, the seconds between now and then seem longer. It’s an exercise in patience.

If you want to hear the ‘full band’ treatment of the song, Malibu Drive is working it into the set list and hopefully will roll it out at our gig in Longmont in December. If you want more regular updates, hit the ‘like’ button on my facebook page.

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