Nothing but this slow trek.

I write songs, but they arrive upon me in ways that don't feel like writing. I suppose my writing works in a similar way. I've started working on a new album this week, after being delayed by a hand injury coming from either a serious brawl or a window frame dropping on my fingers, followed by the demands of coursework, which were then followed by a period of doing nothing but sleeping and watching every film. Now, to start, I have been collecting all the song ideas I will use, separating them from the ideas that will be saved for the next one to be made later this year. But this collection is out of little voice memos I have left to myself. When I start a song, it arrives upon me, most often when I do not even have an instrument near by. It comes as fragments sometimes, but with a full sense of instrumentation and atmosphere. And I sing all these parts into my memos before I lose them again, my voice making up for lacking the lushness that sounds in my mind. This is how my stories come out as well. With these songs, though, as I listen back to them in the sun of my front porch, I hear all the things in the background that return me to those moments. Driving in my car towards home as the sun was setting orange this last autumn. My shower still springing after I skipped out of it. The crack of my parent's fireplace late at night after Christmas, while the good Jimmy Stewart despairs in the background through It's a Wonderful Life. Some birds, some dog, some engines. On one, I am walking the sidewalk, and I briefly run into someone I know, interrupt myself to say hello, then restart. Then I pass a group of elegantly graying women in hairspray and heels and pretend a conversation with someone at the other end. There is a kind of magic in the way a song can fall upon you, like how Michael felt "Billie Jean" drop on his dashboard while driving his car, but the real moments are in this string of days along which these songs have been lit.