This blog has been a feelings and overshare dump since its very sloppy incarnation and we all know that. This summer I challenged the boundaries of its ability to hold feelings and oversharing and I didn’t ask one person for permission. I didn’t worry about what it looked like. I was really burning trash and throwing it into the webisphere for all to see like I owned the place or something. Like I was allowed to take up space or something. And I thank you for the high fives and the kind compassionate looks of encouragement as I lit things on fire. Yay life!
Eff that Eff chord. And so it goes.
My earliest guitar learning was all self-taught. I bought my husband one of those $150 Fender guitar starter kit jobbies one year for Christmas along with 4 guitar lessons. He proceeded to get really really good at Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train,” learned the chords for Sunday school and VBS sing-alongs and then I just snaked it. I just went ahead and took it. I mean, he was working all the live long day and there it was, that guitar, sitting all by its lonesome, while I was home with three little kids cutting sandwiches into quarters and watching the clock til nap time, ya know?
That F Chord was a real doozy. It took me so long to get my hand comfortable with it and it wasn’t even a bar chord. I had a book, no internet, and hours to figure out how to make the guitar work. And I did. In a low level, self-taught kinda way.
I learned cover songs. Let it Be, The River is Wide, 500 Miles, Sentimental Journey, You Belong to Me, Time After Time, Hit Me with your best shot (that one was a kooky strum pattern and I was so proud to have figured it out).
Then I wrote my own songs. Then, five years in, I found a guitar teacher, then I recorded some EPs on my own and then got the guts up to do the records with producers and stuff. And now I’m here.
I love F chords. I love Bb. I love the practice of looking back to the beginning of the story and tracing it from then until now. I used to do it a lot and now I rarely take the time. All those moments where I had a choice to make: to either quit, stay the same or keep going and I marvel at the choice to keep going. All those moments of trying to advance and improve- succeeding in some ways and revealing my lack of experience and skill in others and I kept going. All those times I cried because I couldn’t get it right and something made me get back up and keep trying.
It makes this current moment way more interesting when allowing it to live inside a longer narrative than just, “Hope’s having a hard time writing songs these days.” If I added the first 15 years into what I’m telling myself about my current writing problem? I think it’d be truer to say, “In 15 years, Hope’s never really experienced this kind of extended alligator wrestling match and it’s a test of her trust and a desert she’ll use to help her in the next chapter.”
Ya like that third person treatment? It makes me sound way more epic like I’m standing on a mountain, wind in my hair, looking all middle distancey and what not.
I’m slogging, my friends. It’s been like this for months. I wish I knew the answer. I wish I could confess it. I wish I could steal some of that bright-eyed can-do energy from my 15 years ago self who definitely thought she was writing the best shit out there and that Nashville was going to come knocking any day. I know now she was not a hit machine, but goodness, what I wouldn’t do to believe I was a hit machine?? That kinda swagger writes like 5 a day. How do I get swagger?
Eff chords? Feelings and overshares? A new kickass guitar (which I confess I’m kind of afraid of)? I’m trying it all. In the mean time, I’m looking at all these old notebooks from years and years I’ve saved and collected thinking it’s time to send them on their way. Clear the air of old stories to make room for new ones. Light candles, smudge the room, remove 27 things and then see what I got. Have a good one.