The song cycle has stalled. Something about the electricity of performing it live, of feeling a packed room breathe the songs along with me, has made my solitary pursuits in the attic seem obsolete. I'm afraid I made a mistake when I took my nose up from the grindstone. I looked around at all the unfinished ploughshares crowding my tiny room, and it paralyzed me. Here I thought I had an album's worth of material, but when I looked more closely, I realized how much work still needs to be done--there are powerful starts that sputter out mid-way through the second verse, fiery verses that run with a dull thud into ill-constructed choruses. As long as I had my head down, I could watch the verses accumulate in my periphery with a hysteric glee. Now I've realized that I have to pick through them meticulously, to peel away the lead from the lodestone.
I've always preferred the fever of creation --the immediacy of the freestyle cipher, the way words light on the tongue and split just as quickly-- to the editor's grinding slog through the swampy galleys of undone songs. And I originally thought my lyric regimen was just that: a slow grinding-out of ideas. But I have never before worked at such a rapid pace, and I remember now how I started this project: with a determination to let things flow out, to worry less about content and more about sound, to capture some of the immediacy of my improvisations on record. But now that it's time to record, my old self emerges, the one who fears the condenser mic much like some primitive peoples fear the camera.
The recording steals something vital from me. It delivers a facsimile, a shell, to the listener. When I am there in the room with my words--when I can coax them out of their hiding places, and show them to the audience in their pure form--I have no doubt that they will leave a mark. But when I can't be there with them, tearing my breast and letting their consonant bodies course over my tongue, I start to fear that they're not strong enough to stand alone. So I return to my desk, and dig back into these gorgeous and imperfect pages, and try to extract one single, timeless track. And then another.
