A song I started writing in 2013 or so that remained incomplete until about a month and a half ago. Earlier today on Instagram (@sageharrington) I posted about The Artist’s Way, that most wonderful book on cultivating healthy creativity, which is how I learned to do morning pages: fill three pages each morning. I do it longhand. This writing is allowed to be bad. It is supposed to be boring. It is supposed to, and does, teach you how to get past the blocking aspects of #perfectionism. It helps you turn off your internal critic so that you can get some creative work (or play?) done even if your creative work isn’t writing. This practice is amazing! I love my morning pages. I miss them when I don’t do them. And it was so very very interesting to watch as the remaining lyrics flowed—how smoothly they came onto the page!—after 7 years or so of this song feeling incomplete and abandoned. I attribute this song’s completion to the daily practice of morning pages for preceding six months. Hah!
So here you have it: a song about capitalism and the monetization of silence. What if you actually could sell an experience, a memory, a quiet moment? What if that’s the only way it was available to you? I feel the influences of my beloved Regina Spektor here, especially her earlier songs.
-s