Air Traffic [Emenee Remix]

This song's called Air Traffic! I'll change this text later!

Chug-A-Lug

Today I joined with Daniel and Adrienne to record Oklahoma's favorite song about underage drinking: Roger Miller's Chug-A-Lug.

It sounds like this:

Chug-A-Lug

Flummoxed

I wrote a song this week. It’s the first one since last July. It was a cathartic exercise rather than any sort of real art, but the friend I sent it to said it was beautiful. I can’t post it here.

I know that’s a terrible story, but it’s been a terrible week.

Still no master’s degree. Still no new job. Still haven’t applied enough. Still not done with the children’s show. Still not started on any album. Almost got hit by a car. Was almost certainly an accessory to a crime. Said goodbye and good riddance to a neighbor I’d been trying to help out. Said some really poorly timed things to a friend and haven’t forgiven myself for it yet.

If you know the Lord, please pray for me.

But I know people up against much worse, and so do you. So pray for them, and I will too.

River City

Most of my lived experience of what a "river" means has been formed by a view of this:

The Arkansas, as it flows through south Tulsa, is naturally made up of more sand than water. Which makes it funny that Jenks, Oklahoma, long before the "River Walk" was built and some municipal magic made the water level rise, boasted a giant antique/nick-knack shop with this title:

I've spent a lot of time in River City Trading Post. I bought this Beethoven bust/fancy hat rack there:

 

 My sister recently found THIS there:

 

And our mom used to work there.

Anyhow, today's offering is not part of the Friendstravaganza. It's a song called "River City" that has basically nothing to do with the trading post. 

River City

I've been asked to provide a moment of music at the opening ceremonies for a week-long residency at OU for an Irish playwright this March, and I'm supposed to play one of my own songs and one traditional-sounding Irish song. Do y'all think this one sounds like enough of an Okie tune to balance against the one they pick for me?

On any given day

This weekend I'm visiting Doug, Danae, and Henry Castle out at New Life Ranch in Colcord, Oklahoma. Today was Henry's two-month birthday and we celebrated with brownies and ice cream. Well, all of us who weren't a baby did.

This is the saddest father/son picture I have ever taken:

Doug and I have been friends and musical accomplices since freshman year of high school (about ten years ago now!) and we first played this song together about halfway through that time, maybe late summer, 2006.

Summer Song

Doug wrote it and never really gave it a title. Tonight I tried to sing it while Doug played piano.

This is the Castles' pretty, huge piano named Lester:

These are the words to the song:

I Am a Rock

Installment #1 in Steven's Musical Friendstravaganza 2012!

Kyle Vanderburg recently ordered a lead sheet of Simon and Garfunkle's "I Am a Rock" (don't ask my why), so when I asked him to come over and tell me what song we would record together he pulled it out.

We decided not to listen to the original recording for reference, so what you are about to hear is the (un?)fortunate result of trying to read off the page. Mostly...

I Am a Rock

A couple of hopes for 2012

Twenty years and humpteen-thousand dollars of the taxpayers' (mostly my parents') money later, I am done* with my schooling years. I met a man this week who has been in prison the past twenty years and just got out. There are worse things I could have been doing with my time...

I have several hopes for my life post-graduation, for 2012, some of them better-defined than others. For one, I hope to find a second job to supplement my hours at the Fine Arts Library. I've applied for OU's temp-placement program, and at the insistence of a letter I got in the mail yesterday from a friend in Alabama, this week I will apply for food stamps and for a job at Panera. Those two ingredients, I'm told, will ensure my success. Well, that and meeting Dolly Parton, but that's another story.

This isn't that story, but on Monday a couple friends and I used our day off of work (is January 2nd always a holiday? I'm new to this...) to gallivant around the Arbuckle Mountains. At a little junk shop called "The Gettin' Place" (or something like that) I did pick up a Dolly Parton record. It has both of the songs of hers that I know on it.

We were planning to climb around the castle at Turner Falls Park, but the park was closed. Instead, we found a bridge in Sulpher that looks like it could be part of a castle.

Here's me looking sinister while Caroline and Maggie perch pleasantly on the bridge behind me:

Another hope for this year is to record a song every week, and to probably post it on this blog. Sometimes I'll write new songs, sometimes I'll record songs I just like to sing, and sometimes I'll record songs that my friends like and ask them to play along with me.

Today's offering is called "Going Away" and it's by The Innocence Mission.

Going Away

*Due to a technicality (that is entirely my fault for procrastinating) I still won't have my master's degree until I fill out one more form and have a professor sign it and have three or four foreign dignitaries look at it without giving a harrumph of stately disapproval.

No more school for me (probably) forever

Last Thursday I defended my master's thesis. It was a score for the first 23 minutes (roughly a third) of an album of songs called Welcome Oklahomagain. The project is unsurreptitiously an unofficial installment in Sufjan Stevens's (probably) abandoned "Fifty States Project".

The defense went better than well. It was actually quite fun. All three professors on my committee had encouraging things to say, and each of their critiques of the project in its current state were well-needed and accurate. Nobody didn't sign the piece of paper that tells OU I am "satisfactory", so I guess the Graduate College is satisfactored with me now.

The School of Music, however, must still be sated. A year ago I enrolled in a self-invented independent study called "The Concept Album in Popular Music". Sounds like a fun class, eh? Well, mostly it just meant I got to go to a History of Rock Music class without having to do any assignments or take any tests, which WAS fun. The part that meant I still got 1 hour of graduate elective credit was that I had to write a 25-page paper by the end of it, which I did not do.

I took an incomplete for the course, figuring I could put the paper together in my spare time and turn it in at my leisure. Well, a year's worth of spare time has come and gone and I have found plenty of other things to do at my leisure that are NOT writing a research paper.

So now I've got three days till the end of the semester (and the end of my window of opportunity to receive my master's degree), and I've written nine pages. Six of those happened within the last day. The paper itself is about the two state-themed albums that Sufjan made before he stopped making state-themed albums, so it is directly related to my thesis. But writing something that sounds like research about someone who doesn't get talked about in books is REALLY HARD. So I've abandoned the goal of sounding academic. The paper is a complete hodge-podge of writing styles, meandering in and out of fictional storytelling, music theory analysis, personal anecdotes, biographical sketches, American history, lyrical commentary, and Christian devotion. In other words, the paper reads about how Sufjan's albums sound. 

As long as I make a C on it, they won't withhold my degree. I'll let you know how that pans out...

There are reasons I'm not a writer

Mostly I don't have the habits for it. This blog is evidence of that, even if negative evidence is all that could testify to that particular sort of laziness.

I still have a (mostly useless) fascination with the craft of writing. I received my undergraduate minor in English composition and sat in a variety of writers' workshops and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I count Mystery and Manners, a posthumously published collection of Flannery O'Connor's essays and lectures on the craft of writing (primarily on that subject anyway) among the books that has had the most profound influence on me.

Why, as someone who only reads in fits and starts and writes even less consistently, I should enjoy the subject of writerliness I couldn't say. Every English professor I had (and Flannery, herself at times) talked about a special breed of person who had a hazy notion of wanting to be a writer but little interest in the discipline of actually sitting in front of a blank page and filling it with words.

I'm one of those.

Tonight I finished writing the lyrics to my children's musical. It took me four and a half months, which is four months longer than I had hoped.

And for the first time in my life, I am facing down the possibility that I may truly struggle with the sin of sloth.

Tune Up Our Heartstrings; We'll Sing a Song of Six Wings

Well, attempt number two at a congregational song is miles closer to the target than the first, but I still don't think I've hit it.

This one's got the unfortunate working title that you see at the top of this post. The title alone borrows from one well-known hymn and an bizarre English folk song, and the lyrics (as you will see) pull from the broad span of the Bible as well as moments from my amateur's imagination of physics, child-birthing, and obscure English idioms. The very end of this recording is lifted wholesale (and played incorrectly) from another well-known hymn.

General wordiness is not necessarily a problem; plenty of good hymns have been heavy on the verbiage. But I think this one may just not be focused enough on a single topic to invite the singer into meaningful meditation on the nature of God. It's sort of a fly-over tour of the whole span of scripture with a verse devoted to each person of the Trinity. There's also a weird implication in the line "until we learn to sing along, we'll sing..." implying that the refrain is a sort of sub-par hackneyed way to praise. The implication is intentional, but as a critique of my own laziness in writing a chorus, not of the song of the strange creatures in Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4.

Critical self-reflection on the part of a singer of a song is tremendously important if it leads to repentance. Critical self-reflection on the part of a songwriter has no place in the song itself.

Also, on the whole, this just doesn't repeat anything enough. And I think the melodic range is too wide. And there are too many vocal ornaments...

Oh, and it still sounds terribly sad. That's mostly my voice; in the mouth of another singer in the midst of a full rock band this might be pretty lively.

We'll see where I end up next!

Tune Up Our Heartstrings; We'll Sing a Song of Six Wings (<-again, click here to listen)

"You spoke a word.
The emptiness heard and burst into being.

You called the tune
every sun, every moon, and every atom is ringing.

Tune our hearts to play your song
until we learn to sing along.

You called down a storm.
You dreamed of its form before the waters broke.

You cried out as you died
the opening line of a psalm your father wrote for You!

Tune our hearts to play your song.
Until we learn to sing along, we'll sing...

'Holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.'

You breathed into our lungs.
You burned on our tongues and set fire to the endless void.

You called out our names.
The mute and the lame will sing and dance for joy in You!

'Holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.'

'Holy holy holy
Lord God Almighty
All thy works shall praise thy name
in earth and sky and sea.

Holy holy holy
merciful and mighty
God in three persons
Blessed Trinity.' "

You Alone

So, ever since I joined this church band recently I've been asking myself whether I'm able to write something we could actually sing with the congregation on Sunday morning. In my last post I mentioned the yellow legal pad with song lyrics I was working on. Well, so far I've finished two attempts at a congregational praise song. I haven't succeeded yet, but I'll share what I've got.

Today's offering is a resounding failure on almost every count: it is depressing, it is personal, it is ambiguous, it is graphic, and it is generally inelegant. There is no reason any group of people should ever (ever.) sing this song together.

That said, I do think it is a successful portrait in broad strokes of someone in utter despair finding his only possible solace in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. I just don't know where that sort of a song has a home.

Regarding the music and not the words, the melody I sang on this recording is more than half-improvised. They are not the notes I would choose if I were to try and set the text to sing it in public, but they serve as a snapshot of a sad little creation hobbling up on its new legs to see if it can stand.

You Alone (<-click here to listen)

"When I was accused and my friends ran away,
when I stood still and I couldn't speak,

You alone...
You alone had something to say.

When my father beat me raw with his belt,
when my father threw me out of his house,

You alone...
You alone know how it felt.

When I took the knife and I held my neck on the sharp edge of suicide,
when I chose to die,

You alone...
You alone came out the other side.

You alone...
You alone..."

Portrait of a life told in Thank-You Notes

I snapped this photograph (the first my blog has seen) on Monday morning, September 19th. I was sitting at my kitchen table when I realized how startlingly unexpected the scene before me would have appeared to an earlier version of myself. With the exception of taking a coaster off that stack in the back and placing it underneath the mug, I didn't move a single object from where it had gradually accumulated before I took the picture.

As I sat for a minute and looked at this collection, all I could think of were people I ought to thank for the blessings in front of me. I won't give an exhaustive list, but I will give a long one. I am not the sole author of my life, and I want to duly acknowledge at least one person responsible for each item on the table. Follow with me, if you will, in a sort of heart-shaped spiral from the middle out leftward then back again:

Thank you Mom for the table itself, and for helping me move into the apartment where I now live. It's a much better place than where I was before.

Thank you Sarah Todd for encouraging me to read the Bible start-to-finish this year, and for helping me find a copy of this all-important centerpiece.

Thank you Doug Castle for giving me this Strong's Concordance and Bible Dictionary years ago. It was quite a surprise when I received it, but it has served me powerfully when I've remembered to pull it off the shelf.

Thank you Sufjan Stevens for talking about Flannery O'Connor in your early interviews. As much as I love your music, I have come to love her writing even more, and this little newsletter from her homestead in Georgia (tucked underneath the concordance) is a reminder of the blessing she has been. (By extension, thank you Greg and Beth Castle for inviting me to your wedding in Georgia; elsewise I would likely never have visited O'Connor's home and had the joy of experiencing some of the sights and sounds and smells she did when she lived there.)

Thank you Tim Keller for these couple of books I checked out at the library. I have listened to hundreds of your sermons and profited plenty from them, but seldom do I read a book that causes me to weep openly, and both of these accomplished just such a feat.

Thank you John Piper for complaining so much about the NIV (forgive my choice of One-Year Bible adjacent) and for cheering for the ESV. I'm not so emotionally involved in the choice of one translation over another as you are, but I had never read from an English Standard Bible before, and now this black beauty has become my own personal standard when I'm not reading the daily scripture from the One-Year.

Thank you Daniel and Adrienne Lalli Hills for fostering my love for the state of Oklahoma. Without it I would be feeling terribly ungrounded at this stage in my life, I would not have minored in creative writing or enrolled in the honors college at OU, and possibly wouldn't have come to school here at all. I certainly would not be working on my thesis right now, and I can't imagine anywhere else I would rather be for this season. (Also, thank you Amanda Lack for giving me this sweet Frankoma mug. It's the greatest thing to drink out of I've ever owned.)

Thank you Dad for being a songwriter and providing that example for me from my earliest memories. It has become my own chief occupation, and I never would have thought to even try if you didn't make it seem like a perfectly ordinary way to spend your time. I still write them on the same guitar you wrote yours on, and I still (sometimes) use yellow legal pads to write out the lyrics.

Thank you Tommy Scheurich for helping me both practically and emotionally with my songs. You have listened to, complimented, critiqued, learned to play, and recorded more of my music than almost anyone, and I am terribly excited you're coming back to stay with me for the next couple weeks so we can (among other things) record your parts of my songs for bugs album. (Also, you should take this stack of bank statements or whatever they are back to Virginia when you go. I don't need them. Or your phone charger. Or the giant copper pipes you left on my porch...)

Thank you Michelle Price for inviting me to church after only knowing me for a couple of days. And thank you for inviting me to join the worship band after I had only attended a couple of services! Getting to know the four of you and having a blast learning to play the electric guitar again and having the joy of getting together to sing for the Lord as many as three or four times a week has been the best thing that could possibly happen to me. This pencil would not be resting here were I not working on writing a congregational worship song for the first time in my life. What a surprise THAT would be to any number of my former selves. (Thank you Andrew Eiler, also, for being so enthusiastic for "praise and worship music" and for being a good example to me by leading the church in it yourself. Left to my own, I have been pretty critical and skeptical of the genre, but thanks largely to you and now to my new band-mates, I'm finding myself quite at home with the stuff.)

And if you've made it this far, THANK YOU blog-reader for stopping by this page at all, and for having graciously read so many paragraphs of gratitude that is either mostly or entirely directed at someone other than yourself.

For all of you, and for the many unnamed others to whom I owe immeasurable gratitude, thanks be to God.

Post-Sermons/Songs

Clearly I did not finish what I started last week. I never posted for days 4 and 5, partly because I began to doubt how worthwhile or even humorous a bullet list of disparate titles would be to anyone but myself, but mostly because I didn't finish any songs last week.

I did finish one a couple of days ago, and I should have another done by this weekend. All around, the deadline for having this musical done has been pushed back a little while, which is probably good news.

In other news, I am taking a break from sermon podcasts this week. I went through a lengthy series by Alistair Begg while I read through the book of Ecclesiastes, and quite thoroughly enjoyed it. But it seemed right to let that habit rest. I'm in a period of trying to dislodge myself of the things I value too highly, and I think it quite possible (however counter-intuitive) to let preaching itself to become a sort of idol. This is an idea, ironically, that I have warmed to by way of listening to a lot of preaching on the subject, but nevertheless I need a break.

My feelings about my new church are warming, as well. I'm enjoying both band practice and my fellow band-mates themselves more than I have just about anything in a long long time. I think I was made for this.

Sermons/Songs Day 3

SERMONS:

"A Word to the Wise"

"The Search for Satisfaction"

"Eternity On My Mind"

"All These Lonely People"

"The Meaninglessness of Mechanical Worship"

"Concerning Worship"

(These are all part of a series by Alistair Begg on the book of Ecclesiastes. I've started re-reading it this morning, and these talks have been astoundingly uplifting. When I've read the book before there's been a certain level of catharsis, but for the first time it seems liberating in a way almost to make me cheerful!)

SONG:

"Home Sweet Home"

(This one is about trapeze artists who realize they would rather have dinner with their parents than live as traveling performers.)

Sermons/Songs Day 2

SERMONS:

"Following Jesus: Reconciled to Reconcile"

"Making Sense of Suffering" (Part 1)

"Making Sense of Suffering" (Part 2)

"Making Sense of Suffering" (Part 3)

(The first one was a short exegesis of a passage I had read this morning in 2 Corinthians. The other three were a nearly four-hour epic by D.A. Carson. It lasted through my whole shift at the library and left me with as many questions as answers. )

SONG:

"Sparks Will Fly"
(a tune about a man shot out of a canon in a circus)

Sermons/Songs Day 1

I am writing a children's musical. I have never written music for the theater and I have never written music for children's voices and I have never written in response to a commission, so this has proven to be quite a challenge. I'm coming up close on the deadline, and so in an effort to finish on time, I am determined to write a song every day this week.

As I am typing the present message just moments before midnight, I assure you I did not finish today's song on time. I will not, however, have slept until it was done.

As I mentioned yesterpost, I listen to recorded sermons in my headphones a lot. While preparing meals, taking walks, washing the dishes, or any time where I do not need to be actively listening to my environment, I bombard myself with the sounds of people talking about the Bible.

As a fun experiment, each day this week I am going to post the titles of all the sermons I have listened to that day as well as the title of the song I have been writing. Here goes Monday:

SERMONS:

"Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an angry Judge?"

"Lost People Matter to Jesus"

"How Can I Believe Jesus Rose From the Dead?"

"What Is the Ministry and Mission of the Local Church? Foundations from the Pastoral Epistles"

SONG:

"Gotta Have Some Giggles"
(It's about clowns.)

"Praise Him with the Electric Guitar"*

This morning I helped the praise team at a little church in Norman, OK usher in a new era of singing to the Lord.

I made a new friend in the library my first week of working there and she invited me to church that weekend. I had not been regularly attending anywhere in over six months, and I was glad to receive the invitation, but when I left the service I wasn’t sure I wanted to come back. The folks were friendly and the preaching held the Bible in high regard, even if the style and attitude of the sermon were not what I would seek out in a pastor. The music was played quite well, but was in a sort of sad state. It was just an electric keyboard, and electric drum-set, and a CD playing a track from a live worship album. I think they had been doing it that way for several years.

Word got out that I play the guitar, I jammed with the drummer and keyboard player, and now three weeks later I’m in the band. Today was a big day. They’ve wanted to “go live” (stop playing to a CD) for a long time, and have been praying for the right people to come along. I got a lot of handshakes (and a high-five from the pastor) and people told me I was an answer to prayer. I hope it’s true. I hope I’m really able to serve at this new place, and not just by playing guitar.

I had gotten quite comfortable NOT going to church. I read the Bible (almost) every day, I spend (at least a little) time praying most hours, and I listen to recorded sermons all week long from a variety of podcasts. I sing hymns at my piano, and I write checks every month to ministries I want to support. I mean, that about covers it, right?

I thought so.

But ever since I visited this church three weeks ago, I realized how terribly lonely my entire spiritual life is, and I was thrown into a soul-plumbing fit of searching and questioning and pulling my hair out over what it means to be a part of Christ’s body on Earth. And before I’d come up with any really good answers, I received a text message saying that they’d got the thumbs up to go live and I was needed this Sunday to play.

So here I am to worship, I guess. I enjoy hanging out with the other musicians, and it feels really good to get to play electric guitar again. This morning they asked for people to volunteer with the children’s ministry and I realized that I genuinely want to do that. I wouldn’t have chosen this church as a place to call home, but for now it looks like it has chosen me.

I have a sneaking suspicion that those “really good answers” I was trying to find are probably trying to find me, too.

I'm back in the saddle again.

If you are reading this, you are either A.)Lost, B.)More patient with me than I would have guessed, or C.)Responding to me directly telling you, "Hey, maybe my blog isn't dead after all!"

My last go-round with this thing burned me out, so I’m going to try a new approach. The previous posts on here meandered between overly-calculated memoir and this:

http://www.deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com/

Actually, they were nowhere near as good as Jack Handey, though I do have another blog that is just as pithy (if not half as clever) as his wealth of wisdom. It’s called “My Feelings Are Symphonic And You Should Care About Them” and it’s here:

http://myfeelingsaresymphonic.blogspot.com/

Because I KNOW I use at least 10 times as many words as are needed to say most things, I started “My feelings are symphonic” to challenge myself to share my thoughts one sentence at a time.

But I started “the smallest of voices” for those thoughts that aren’t directed at any one friend (and thus get blogged instead of put into a letter or a conversation), but also can’t be expressed in a single sentence.

I got carried away with trying to create something of lasting value (STORY OF MY LIFE… ask me about any of the albums I’m still… still… still… trying to write and record), and so I set up a format that I wasn’t capable of maintaining. I wanted to share some little story of something that had happened to me, but ground it in two complementary passages from the Bible. I never explained this, I just put the scripture references in the “Labels” section at the bottom of each post hoping people would notice the trend, look those verses up and say “A-ha! Steven’s daily experience is rooted in his knowledge of the Bible! He’s a good guy! He knows the Book! I’m learning something from this! My life can be clarified by viewing it through the lens of Divine Revelation as well!”

The problem is that I don’t know the Bible well enough to do that for very long. I’m reading through all of it this year (for the first time in my life), but that doesn’t mean I can call up any passage to memory at any time. I spent a lot of time at bible.cc to create the posts I did.

So I’m going to try and do this more off-the-cuff now. Nobody expects anything different from me, and if any of you ARE here on purpose and are patient enough to have made it to this paragraph, 1.)Thank you, and 2.)I’ll try not to waste your time, even if I don’t spend much time writing these anymore.

Plus, I own both a legit camera and a phone that takes decent pictures now, so maybe I can type less and post more photos of what I’m doing. Which, frankly, isn’t much to look at. I moved into a new apartment and started a new job lately, and most of my time is spent at work, organizing my apartment, or composing. There is nothing picturesque about writing music.

And on that note, I’m going to get back to what I should have been doing the last half-hour instead of typing this; orchestrating my “songs for bugs.” I’ll be recording string parts next week for them. Maybe I’ll post the results…

Perhaps I ought to spread out my reading every day.

This year I'm reading through the "One Year Bible." Each day presents a passage from the Old Testament, the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. As of today, I've journeyed from the creation of the world up until David's adultery with Bathsheba and his betrayal of Uriah. I've also followed the life of Jesus on earth through three full gospels and I'm now sitting and listening with his disciples at the last supper in the gospel of John. Because the Old Testament story is so epic and bloody and full of heavy, difficult truths, and because the gospels are so full of our Lord's radiant life, and full of heavier, more difficult truths, most days I am exhausted and I let my eyes glide over the Psalms and Proverbs and they hardly sink in.

Not so, today. I woke up early and read from 2nd Samuel, slept in a while longer and read from John, but before continuing on, I knew I was supposed to leave the Book where it was and return to it later.

This evening, now, I have returned, and much to my delight, this is what I found:



"Your decrees are the theme of my song wherever I lodge."
-Psalm 119:54


"The earth is filled with your love, O Lord; teach me your decrees."
-Psalm 119:64



"To a man belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue.
All a man's ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the Lord.
Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed."
-Proverbs 16:1-3

I don't have the strength of mind to lay out for you why those verses hit me so hard today, but I hope they fill you with as much wonder and conviction and encouragement as they do me.

These melodies sound OK together

By and large, composing is a lonely occupation. You spend a lot of time humming to yourself and drawing little dots and lines and if you’re distracted easily (like I usually am) you just don’t even bother with it unless you’re alone and reasonably sure to stay alone until you’ve got a good amount of work done.

But so that you, my kind readers, might have a peek into the process and say “How interesting!” I present to you a thrilling musical discovery:

Two tunes I’ve been wanting to use for Welcome Oklahomagain* overlay on top of one another in surprisingly useful counterpoint! After hitting the snooze button a few times yesterday morning, I was half awake and had one of these melodies running through my head. In a moment of strange and miraculous insight (certainly not a moment of clarity, as I was still pretty groggy), I thought “Oh, this other phrase would probably work if it comes in partway through this one…” Without leaving the bed, I reached for my clavichord (a hilariously quiet keyboard instrument that has been out of vogue for about 300 years) and twiddled my fingers through the two melodies together and realized it was a nearly perfect fit!

Here’s the first tune I had in my head (first with only the clavichord, then with me singing some words):

theme1.mp3

It has been with me since Easter 2010.

Here’s the other one (again on clavichord and then with words):

theme2.mp3

That one has been rattling around in my brain since sometime in 2007.

And then here they are together without any singing:

bothtunes.mp3

Can you hear both melodies? Don’t they go together nicely? If I hadn't just played them each alone and told you they came three years apart, they would probably just sound like one inseparable unit.

I don’t know yet if both lyrical ideas will gel into the same song, but I feel hopeful that they can. If so, the part about an allegorical trailer park drug bust will be near the beginning and the bit about a scissortail flycatcher will come later among a litany of other “signs that you’re going to be OK”. Even if these end up as two separate songs, it is still going to be great to be able to use that scissortail melody as the featured vocal line in one spot on the album and as a hidden bass line in another.

*Welcome Oklahomagain is my master’s thesis project, a fan-fiction third installment in Sufjan Stevens’s abandoned “50 States” album series.