I Wrote A Song

My big new thing is that I wrote a song. I’m thinking a lot lately about my family, and feminism (a LOT about feminism), and social media and its discontents, and circus, and money, and how I want to knit a lot of scarves all of a sudden, but underneath and around and on top of all those other things is: I wrote a song. I was at home a couple of weeks ago getting ready for bed after a bracing bout of Facebook wittery, when all of a sudden I started hearing some words and then a tune. Having had something slightly similar happen to me before, quite a long time ago now, I knew that I had to sit down immediately and scribble it out. I made up a tune and sang it until I had memorized it and knew I would remember it the next morning. I texted my rockstar friend at midnight on a Wednesday: “I wrote a song!”

Since then I have sung the song to myself a thousand times: in the shower washing my hair, in the kitchen making minestrone, in friends’ lounges, on Skype to my mom and sister, under my breath on my afternoon bus, walking home from New World with a shopping bag full of Swiss chocolate, baby spinach, and Greek yogurt. When I was in Melbourne with Theresa I sang myself to sleep every night on her couch. If this song were a person I would be texting it nonstop and considering surprising it with flowers at work. I probably would have already told it I loved it even though we’ve only been together a short while and I’m not really sure where this is going.

My abovementioned rockstar friend has been very supportive about this whole thing, I’m happy to say. We’ve been having “band practice,” in the intervening weeks–to which I am unable to refer without quotes because I am not completely sure if two buddies and one guitar counts as a band—and he’s put together the accompaniment to the song and sings backup. We’ve even made what may be the worst demo recording of any song ever sung by any human beings ever in the history of time, which I love with all my heart even though I sort of cringe and grind my teeth every time I listen to my own voice. I have storyboarded, using the sophisticated media of pencil and post-its, a music video concept and I am having the first “production meeting” with a film-y friend this weekend to talk about if we can actually do it for real.

This is all pretty exciting to me for various reasons, one very simple one being that I enjoy having hobbies and doing projects, which I have decided are the solution to Wellington winter blues. Also, I like to sing and I like to write. Also, I really like having supremely ridiculous conversations where I say things like “Yeah, I just think the chorus could be a little more dynamic, you know?” or “If this song were a celebrity it would be Zoey Deschanel.” Also, I absolutely love telling people that I have band practice. Band practice! I have been wanting to go to band practice for, like, twenty years.

I don’t think the song is necessarily even a very good song, for all my planning and excitement and my insistence upon talking about no other subject. It’s quite a silly song, actually. It’s catchy and it has rhymes, but that’s about it. It’s not about anything meaningful or important. It’s just a fun silly song.

What I love about it the most is that I heard it, somehow, on a Wednesday night when I should have been filling my hot water bottles, and that I took myself seriously enough to sit down and get it on paper, even though I don’t know anything about music except what I like to listen to and what my voice can sing. I like that my brain is thinking new thoughts. I like that one of those thoughts is: “Hey, I wrote a song. What else can I do?” What I love most about this song is that I wrote it. I love that I wrote a song.