I’m so much older than I can take.

Things serve explicit functions in my life these days.  And, typing at 1am the potentially hidden meaning in that phrase doesn’t escape me, untrue though it may be.  What I mean is this:  I don’t just do things anymore.  I do things because they do things for, or to, me.  I eat to survive.  I work to pay my bills.  I go to the gym to work out my frustrations and to feel some of that glorious testosterone madness.  I do yoga to find peace, fleeting as it comes.

Music, though.  Music is a thing I do because I have to, because if I go too long without it, I start to go crazy.  Music is magic, and powerful, draining and salvative.  Iggy Pop once said in an interview about music ‘when I’m in the grips of it, I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain, either physically or emotionally.’  The first time I heard that, after having poured my soul out in bands for years already by that point, I had this transformative realization.  The man was right.  I played music and I thought I wanted to be a big rich rock star, but the real reason I’d always been drawn to it is exactly how he said…when you’re in the grips of music your you vanishes. There is a presence and a creation, and a symbiotic relationship between the flesh and the tools that conjure vibrations, but deep down at the core of it..there’s a beautiful, wonderful nothingness.

It was this nothingness I always craved.  A rare handful of moments in which my brain stopped racing and my body stopped aching, my self-consciousness disappeared.  Maybe that’s what being a rock star is all about–forgetting for a while that you’re flawed.  Maybe those moments are why we find them so beautiful.

Over the last few years music has become a more sporadic enterprise for me.  I haven’t played in bands in ages and the guitars come out less often as I get busy.  Recently, however, between writing scores for two features and a long-format series of shorts (two of which I also did cinematography for, toot-toot) has me back at my recording station, playing stacks of synths at the same time, digging into drum machines and sequencing software, and with that, in the spare moments, comes a remembrance of all the other music.  The hollow-body made an unexpected appearance a few weeks back and I lost myself for a good long time just playing loud and overdriven mush.  Tonight I got lost in the land of iPad-based music creation.  I spent hours with generative music apps, drone synths, and clever sequencers that remove the rigid boundaries of square boxes with 16-32 sequence buttons.  If I’d had more free money to spend I’d probably still be digging into the 6 or 7 other apps I added to my ‘wish list’, hopefully to be remembered at some later time.

So I have this newly awakened desire.  For the last month or two I’ve been thinking about writing a ‘score’ for an already existing movie, but making it very beat-centric.  Once that’s done I want to get a few of the local hip hop people to throw some words over it.  And that will be cool and all, but I don’t really see myself making it terribly far in the hip hop world.  But now I’m motivated, and after that’s done I think it’s finally finally FINALLY time to write that album that’s been churning through my brain the last few years.  Interestingly enough, my friend who works for a recording studio expressed the same burning feeling tonight, purely at random.  Who knows, maybe we’ll make something great.  Or, more likely, maybe we’ll make something that sounds like two mid-to-late-30 year old irrelevant dudes threw together.  Either way, it’ll be a nice return to something that’s always been a major driving force in my life.

I’m not really sure what the point of this post is, other than I felt like saying some stuff.  I worked a long, brutal week.  Went back to the gym for the first few times post-surgery.  Did some yoga, also for the first time in far too long.  Other than that, I forced myself to toil on these scores I’m trying to finish.  Drudgery music.  It’s draining, time consuming, and really frustrating when stuff doesn’t work.  But in those moments, when I stepped away and played just for me, the way I’ve always done…god damn was it good.  I’d say I wish everybody could hear it, but that would be a lie.  I got to hear it as I was creating it and, honestly, that’s the only thing that matters.