Years ago I wrote a song titled ‘The Golden Rule and How it Applies to Songwriting" and while I won't bore, bother or burden us all with the entire lyrics, I would like to quote the chorus right quickly:

“We only write songs about what is wrong and broken
So I must conclude: happiness is misery
Where you’ll find me on your doorstep singing
Songs about what is right and worth mending”

I guess I want to reference this song for two different reasons:

1. For the most part the songs I wrote (and my writing in general) have always been centered around those things both wrong and broken. In the prime of my lyrical outpourings (late 2003 to probably around the summer of 2005) I was a machine: I turned out song after song after song, with nothing to impede my path. My job took up only 25 hours of my week; I lived alone in a fourteen by eighteen foot studio apartment; I didn’t own a television, a bed, a couch, a cd player, a car or a cell phone. My body had to satisfy its need for nutrients via coffee, PB&Js, store brand potato chips and magnums of bottom shelf White Zin. My weekends were typically spent sitting in front of the world’s cheapest, shittiest microphone (given to me when I was fifteen and spent every other day at the only local music store playing little punk and hardcore riffs on guitars much more expensive than the Mexican made Strat I had at home; given to me by the owner of this music store because he felt sorry for me, of this I am certain) and my Tascam four-track (at the time one of the most expensive things I owned, all at $100 retail). Weekends that weren’t spent with the mike, the four-track and a couple pots of coffee where spent with friends, drinking and bar-b-queing and generally accomplishing little more than a unearthing more material for more songs for the next weekend. Yes, I’ve gone back through all those four-track cassette tapes and I’ve catalogued it all and yes, it is outrageously ridiculous: clocking in at just over four and a half hours, me sitting alone in my studio (with some other people-slash-places mixed in. And on a side note, any musicians out there with experience recording to four-track, alone, just you and your instrument, will undoubtedly understand that this four and a half hours is but a small (read SMALL) sampling of everything that occurred between those four walls. A pathetic a beautiful time capsule.) But so I’ve catalogued and transferred and half-assedly mixed down all these cassettes, and now I, a closer-to-normal-than-not citizen who does own a car, a (although it quite small and useless now with the digital switch) television, a bed, and a couch I found behind some random apartment complex last summer, along with all these typical things I also possess seventy-plus songs on my laptop all composed by myself, all lofi and all (mostly) genius. And all (mostly) about things wrong and broken.
   
   Wrong and broken choices (and is ‘broken choices’ understood? You have right choices and then you have those decisions that at the decisive moment, and for a while after that even, seemed so very right or maybe just a little right but right nonetheless and then somehow it all went haywire). Wrong and broken relationships, friendships, days and weekends. Wrong and broken family interactions. Drinks poured by cute bartenders but wrongly poured. Broken drinks that didn’t fix the night, didn’t fix everything and anything, even though the cute bartenders swore that they would. Broken guitar strings and guitars tuned wrong. Broken hearts and all the wrong reasons to even own a heart at all. These are the things I wrote songs about.
   
   And:


2. In the seventy-plus songs I found on cheap cassette tapes recorded during that time in my life the only song I’m regretful that I don’t have a copy of is this one. I have innumerable songs detailing the titillation and trial of love affairs, the fallacy and faultlessness of old friends; the semi-destructive idiosyncrasies harbored by my mother like a pipe-bomb unaware of its explosive power. Within these hours of songs and pages upon pages of lyrics that all waver between either what is wrong or is broken there isn’t a single song, a single page, about things right and worth mending. Sure in there some place is that one song about how the Minutemen re-band, instigate a political coup and because of this we all enjoy a new Golden Age and in there some other place is my horrible cover of F.Y.P’s Toss My Cookies, but beyond fantastical poeticism and bad covers, this opus of mine speaks of nothing else but pain, dejection and heart break.

How ironic it it that now, as I meditate on my past – a past only so distant as to be defined as my past’s future – I find myself longing, searching for and missing for lack of discovery the only song I know that I wrote that attempts to picture a brighter, happier future; a future that I didn’t ever have enough faith in to even commit its luminance to tape.