If you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you already know most of what I’m about to write. But on this big Internet there is still a chance that a stranger will darken the digital doorway, and if that’s you, I’m happy to have you here. My name is Tris, and I am a word-writer who spends an unjustifiable amount of time making music. In my life, I have written hundreds and hundreds of songs, many of which are, to be frank, downright awful. Songs come to me while I’m riding my bike, while I’m eating breakfast, while I’m in the swimming pool, even when I’m dreaming — and since everything feels like a winner to me when it’s fresh, I’ll always take the time to bring those ideas to some kind of tentative completion. (Later — sometimes much later — I’ll realize that some of these songs weren’t worth finishing, but I never learn my lesson.) For years, songwriting was like a tap that I could turn on as I pleased, which is not at all the same as saying that the water was pure or drinkable. I wasn’t always proud of my musicianship, and I didn’t have any claim to quality control, but I sure did like that the pilot light of inspiration never gutted out.
Around the beginning of this decade, I took a word-writing job that absorbed all of my energy. During the time I did that job — more than four years! — I didn’t write a single song. I didn’t mention this to my friends; I tried not to mention it to myself. But on a semi-conscious level, this bugged me. Soon, I reasoned, that job would come to its natural end, and the water would start rushing through the pipe again. Maybe the spigot would be rusty and there’d be pellets of lead clanging around in the bucket at first, but the plumbing was still intact. I hoped. It also occurred to me that nothing is forever, and just because I had no problem writing when I was a kid didn’t necessarily mean that I could switch it back on now that I’m an ancient red dragon. I started to wonder whether the batch of songs I’d written in 2009 might be the last I’d ever come up with. If so, was that really the way I wanted this story to end?
As it turned out, I couldn’t get the tap to work. Not even a trickle. The part of my brain responsible for music composition seemed to have burned out. I still loved music as much as I ever had, and listened as much as I ever had — I just had no ideas of my own, and I wondered whether I had anything left I wanted to express. Nothing came to me in the shower, or when I was reading the newspaper (that always used to do the trick), or when I was asleep. I attempted to console myself with the knowledge that I’d made four albums that were each, in its own way, pretty good, and that there were millions of people in this world who’d never heard them. Maybe instead of generating new material, I could turn my attention to my back catalog and move some digital copies. Then again, Hayden once sang “Write a song/all your old ones don’t mean a thing/If you don’t sing any new ones,” and I know exactly what he means. Besides, I’m not a marketer, I’m a mess-maker.
Then one day it changed. Like the flu, or a sleazy dude at a bar, it came on pretty quick. In Richmond I saw a guy leave a hardware store and stick a flag on a drape. On the same Carytown block, a couple of aggro kids with red, white and blue pins on their lapels hawked historic tours to gullible Yankees. Everything felt symbolic and ritualized. And I thought to myself “Saturday morning, shopkeeper yawning, hangs on the awning an American flag.” This is a very Randy Newman-ish stanza, and I heard it in Randy’s voice, and I put it to a Randy melody. Which I realized wouldn’t do at all. It’s one thing to be influenced by an artist you respect, and quite another to engage in mimicry. When I got back to Jersey, I turned the tune around, added a few more verses and a chorus, and called it a new number. The next day I wrote another. And then another.
I wrote 29 songs in 2015. Today I consider them the best I’ve ever done, but deep down I fear I’m dead wrong about that, and a year or two will give some perspective and throw some cold water on my delusions. So I decided not to give myself that year or two: while I’m enthusiastic about the material, I want to cut it all, while it’s fresh, and find a good way to put it out. Lucky I am that the people who are closest to me are entirely (and maybe unaccountably?) supportive of my renewed musical ambitions – they seem to want this happen as much as I do. They believe that I can pick up where I left off in 2009, and they want to help me get there.
I wish I shared their confidence. It occurs to me that many things may have happened over the years that might make it difficult for me to regain my footing as a performing musician. As a young person, I was usually able to draw and hold a crowd. I don’t know if I can do that anymore. My singing has always been an iffy proposition even when I was in practice, and vocal muscles do deteriorate over time. When I’m not playing with a band, my skills atrophy at an alarming rate. It’s depressing, not to mention time-consuming, to work every day just to get back to the level of functional competence that I believed I’d attained a few decades ago. There’s no guarantee that I can get in step with contemporary trends in recording, and writing, and presentation.
But what the hell, I was never in step with any of that stuff. If you liked my music, chances are you never did because it was au courant in any way, or because I had any relationship with the zeitgeist beyond total estrangement. Come to think of it, my awkwardness was probably part of the charm for the people who’d call themselves Tris McCall fans. As there was never any sex sell involved in my project, my advanced age and physical decrepitude shouldn’t be much of a hurdle to clear (at least for you.) As for the other stuff – playing and singing in tune and in rhythm – I’ve heard there have been further computerized advancements in this area since the turn of the decade. I intend to avail myself of all of them. You think I have shame? I have no shame.
So there you have it: I’m getting back into the music game. I expect this to be a long and agonizing process – a climb up a high and rocky hill – and I’m going to chronicle it here for the ill amusement of Whom It May Concern. If you came looking for the Critics Poll, well, that’s a February thing, and February is over. The calendar flips by quick; it’ll be poll time again before we know it. Until then, I hope you’ll join with me on my gurney, as Nordom the rogue modron from Planescape: Torment once said. The very worst that can happen is that I fall on my face and you get to indulge in some authorized schadenfreude. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. It might just be the early spring sun, but today I think this may just be, in spite of everything, a story with a happy ending.