One of my residents is a famous musician. Literally. He’s a saxophonist that has played with the likes of Glenn Miller. Pretty cool. He likes to practice every afternoon and if you walk through the building you can hear the sounds of his soulful melodies drifting through the air.
He found out that I’m also a musician and I think we have a special bond now. Our company is in the process of a name change; eventually our name will be Allegro. He knew that this was a musical term but couldn’t remember exactly what it meant. So he came to me. I couldn’t remember either. Google to the rescue.
Allegro is “lively and quick.” We talked about that, and he looked at the design of the logo and commented that it was kind of lame (not in those exact words). He felt that if they were going to incorporate a musical term into their name, the logo should reflect that.
Then his eyes lit up and you could see the lightbulb over his head.
“We should write a song about the new name!”
I could feel that fake smile begin to plaster across my face. “Oh, what a good idea!” was what came out of my mouth. “I don’t have time for that!” was what was in my brain. I looked at my overflowing desk that I can never seem to get cleared off.
Then I remembered the second part of my dream.
Songwriting. I have dabbled in this for years and have had dreams of writing life changing songs. In reading through old journals, I have seen lots of attempts at lyrics. I love the thought of taking a frustrating or joyous feeling and making it fit into the confines of a three to four minute song. Often feelings that I can’t put to words are expressed beautifully by a song someone else has written. I feel I can deal with those feelings so much easier once it’s in song form. I want to write songs like that; songs where people say, “THAT’S what I’ve been feeling. I haven’t been able to put my finger on it, but that’s it right there.”
I have co-written a couple of songs with a friend, and have recordings of some of them. I’ve heard positive feedback on them. I have not attempted yet to write a complete song on my own, and that’s my ultimate goal. I could totally suck at it. But I know I need to give it a shot. One thing Quitter talks about is giving yourself freedom to fail miserably. And fail in a way that people are still blessed through it. I want to write songs that might possibly be crappy. Heck, my first attempts will be crappy. I can almost guarantee it. Cheeseball, here we come.
Quitter talks of giving yourself fake deadlines to help push you forward. I think perhaps I need to do that with this songwriting thing. Give myself a week or so to write a song. Any song. It may have roses are red lyrics and a melody similar to Mary Had a Little Lamb and will probably be in the key of D (the easiest key for me on guitar… I capo almost everything to this key). That’s okay. I need to start somewhere. Drew told me to write a song about how hard it is to write a song. This might be a good place to start.
As I stood there in my office with my musically inclined resident, it hit me that this might be a way to find things about my day job that incorporate with my dream job. Maybe writing a song with my resident will be a good way to get my brain moving. Maybe it will inspire me to write more. Chances are he’ll forget about it anyway, but I really shouldn’t dismiss it right away.
