Given that I’ve been feeling the way I described in my last entry, I decided that I needed to write music. For me, writing and recording music is one of the only healthy ways I have to deal with frustration of various kinds. So last night around 1am, I sat down with my keyboard and decided to write and record a song. What happened next was amazing–I composed and played something which, more than any other song at the moment I wrote it, mirrored my thoughts and feelings with infinitely better accuracy than any number of words. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this song, in terms of how it describes my emotional state, is worth a million.
I finished recording around 6am (record time, but it felt even faster in my sleep-deprived state combined with the music-induced haze-drone) and took the rough cut on a walk to a nearby hill to see the sunrise and set the song free to God. I listened to it over and over again, noticing how I’d surprised myself by making it a little hopeful at the end, which I didn’t think I had in me. But listening to the song, I felt that it actually gave me the hope that I’d written into it, in a way that I couldn’t have got it directly. It felt transcendent.
I thought I’d link to this rough unmixed/unedited cut here. It’s stripped down, but to my mind still pulsing with the sorrow and raw emotion I put into it. I have no idea how it will impinge on your auditory senses, but I would definitely recommend listening with good headphones in a quiet place (or outdoors underneath grey skies). If you can, give it your full attention and let it take you where it wants to. I believe that this will clue you in to my current life experience much better and more directly than, say, by reading my last entry.
Since the song is so connected to what I was writing about in that entry, though, I named it after a phrase that I liked from it. So here it is:
A Storm Of My Own Devising
(it’s in iTunes format [m4a] – you’ll need to right-click and Save Target As or whatever)
Cheers. I’m off to take a nap.
3 replies on “A Storm Of My Own Devising”
that is one of the most amazingly powerful, moving, dramatic songs I have ever listened to.
I can’t get this as a song…only as a text file…even when I right click…help…
Hmm, you’re right, Safari does something goofy with it. Here’s the fix:
1) Download file to your desktop as “storm.m4a.txt” or whatever
2) Rename the file to ‘storm.m4a’
3) Choose “use .m4a” if a dialog box pops up asking you if you really want to change the extension.
Or use Firefox or Camino.