music recharge

I have been getting hints from the world that I need to be playing music again. I noticed that its been 2 or 3 weeks since I really sat down and played guitar, especially to create new music. I get so wrapped up with school, especially because I like my classes now, that I find myself reading page after page, novel after novel, while my guitar sits sadly leaned against my wall. But I haven't done anything about it. Meanwhile, I have received emails from people I've played shows for in the East coast, asking if I would like to come to Maine and perform. Another email from a childhood family friend inviting me to play at a camp I used to go to growing up to perform in a small town in Pennsylvania. Friends of friends have been asking about me, have I made another CD since the one I made a year and a half ago? I got invited to play at a showcase on a thursday night, but couldn't make it. And then, finally, something just broke open in me and the only thing I could count on was my guitar to provide the framework for a form of expression I don't know how to do in any other way but to just sing... not always words, sometimes just sounds.

Perhaps we all need an emotional kick in the ass to start that creative energy flow. I think I'm with Beethoven on that one, the more emotional struggle happening, the more the melodies and the attempts to process through these struggles in a way that doesn't rely solely on spoken words... but on music, and something moldable and abstract. Somehow these forms represent things in a more true way. I'm taking a class on Emily Dickinson right now. I think the reason I am an english major and the reason I find poetry in particular so necessary, is because it breaks down sentence structure and builds language around new ideas. I want to do that too. Its strange how fiction and poetry and art, all invented experiences can feel like they are the most true expressions of reality. They get at the heart of things. They're not trying to prove something to somebody. They exist out of the need to exist, art for arts sake.

Right now my musical inspiration has been closely tied to visuals. I have this visual of me standing in the colorodo river, with the two walls of the grand canyon on either side of me. And rather than climb back up the side I climbed down, or climbing to the other side and dividing myself from my past, I'm walking through the water, where the life is. I want to paint this picture into a song, and express this feeling of being deeply connected to a form of life that cuts miles into the earth, and flows a little closer to its core, while remaining slightly disconnected from past experiences (in this case romantic) and the potential of a new experience, given the knowledge that love can be painful and the climb is going further and further away from the source of life, the water.

So I've been drawing pictures and scribbling words, and playing guitar by the river just letting these feelings shape sounds and a song structure. I hope to be able to make something of it, and share it with others when its ready.