I try to be honest with my music. None of that "I'm sad because I'm not pretty enough for you" bullshit.
My lyrics and my songs translate my raw human experiences and emotions.
But still, I am followed around by my own shadow holding onto my heels saying "Face it, Patience, you're just a fake."
I taught myself guitar. I don't even know most of the chords I am playing. I remember them by how they sound. I feel insignificant playing with other musicians.
E minor 7th? Uhh...Yeah. That's a great chord. I love that one.
What am I playing? Uh...It's the chord that sounds like Sunday mornings. You know? That one.
This is how my brain works. I'm not a real musician at all.
My songs are never good enough. The chords become redundant, the purpose unclear.
I don't play enough. I should be booking gigs every weekend. I should be meeting people. I should be getting a full band together. But I don't.
Because I'm a fake.
Bullshit, love. So you don't know the technicalities of music. Ok. I'm pretty sure no one sat down and said, I'm going to invent an E minor 7th, and then I'm going to invent a Csus9. Let me share something with you I learned about musicians in Ireland. For the most part, not a damn one of them knows how to read music. They learn by ear. Every song is played differently depending on who you learned it from. You can sit in a room and listen to five different people play a tune five different ways and go around the circle saying "you learned it from a piper, you learned it from a fiddler, you learned it from a flutist," and so on, because they play what they see and what they hear and what they feel. They don't even know time; they just know that jigs are "rashers and sausages" and reels are "black and decker." Are you going to tell me that they aren't real musicians? I'll hit you.
ReplyDeleteYou know what you get when you write songs because of how the chords feel instead of whether or not they're supposed to work together? Songs that you can feel in your bones. Songs that vibrate through you and carry you into the music. That hardly makes you a fake, whether or not you know the root of the pentatonic scale.
I get what you mean. I could sit here and write nearly the same post about being a writer. And you'd tell me I'm ridiculous. So are you going to tell me that you aren't a real musician? I'll hit you.
Yeah, you're no fake musician, sweetness.
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