"Using a favorite quotation from an essay or book you have read in the last three years as a starting point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world. Please write the quotation, title and author at the beginning of your essay."
“Actually in the down periods you might not write the songs, but you write them about being down. Pink Moon is about emerging out of the depression and looking back down into the abyss.” - Paul Wheeler, about Nick Drake, from Remembered For A While
I read a biography on singer-songwriter Nick Drake with 2 others. Both were songwriters, and inspired me to write songs and seriously consider being a musician. We would interpret Nick’s lyrics; how he wrote about human subjects using nature metaphors, and conveyed emotion despite cryptic language, inspired my lyrics. For example, for songs like “Come Into The Garden”, the meaning is not quite clear and you have to match every line to an interpretation; I think the song is about suicide. Nick committed suicide two years after his last album.
The book analyzed Drake’s songwriting technique, and how he used simplicity to build songs around single concepts, which intrigued me. I don’t write songs that are straightforwardly understandable. I pick stories or emotions from my past or present, and think of the ways I want to express it. It’s almost like writing an essay; I make sure to cover every facet of my emotions. But I make my lyrics cryptic and vague in a profound way, so people can find their own meaning in it instead of being forced.
As Nick’s friend Paul Wheeler said, Pink Moon is about emerging out of depression and looking back. To me, it’s a perfect album because it’s not overly depressing. People describe it as depressing, but that’s not right. Some parts are joyful in a laidback, sentimental way. “From The Morning” is about taking beautiful things from the morning and placing them in the night. The album is about looking at past failures and losses of love, and seeing them with new maturity and acceptance of personal darkness. “From The Morning” is such a forward-facing song, even in its melody, and is a perfect closer. An entirely depressing and broken album would not be as influential or artful.
Nick recorded the songs for the unfinished album that would have come after Pink Moon while he was in a dark period, right before he died. You can hear the brokenness and deterioration in his voice. As he sings “I’m growing old and I wanna go home” on “Black Eyed Dog”, he does sound older far beyond his years. The songs don’t have the same effect as Pink Moon because he struggled to be coherent; “Rider On The Wheel”, for example, is bittersweet and devoid of meaning. But these songs are interesting in a completely different way. When you’re in the middle of a dark period, there’s a sincerity that you can’t recapture.
This idea that some emotional moments can’t be recaptured goes for all my art, even my drawings. I have some old art that should be technically worse because I’m always improving; but sometimes they have haunting qualities, due to what I was feeling at that moment, that I can’t recapture. I see this pattern of early art having an untouchableness in a lot of artists. It interests me that they may think their old art is bad because they’re not in that emotional state anymore, but it’s actually just amazing in a different way.
But like Nick, sometimes I write songs about past situations instead of what I’m feeling at the moment. Sometimes, the song can even come out more emotionally convicting when I’m looking at the situation through a new lens. Writing about my past mistakes makes me enlightened because I realize how I’ve changed and how everything shifted for the better. It even tells me that in the future, things might not be so bad, because I can look at the past and see how the now is easier.
The book analyzed Drake’s songwriting technique, and how he used simplicity to build songs around single concepts, which intrigued me. I don’t write songs that are straightforwardly understandable. I pick stories or emotions from my past or present, and think of the ways I want to express it. It’s almost like writing an essay; I make sure to cover every facet of my emotions. But I make my lyrics cryptic and vague in a profound way, so people can find their own meaning in it instead of being forced.
As Nick’s friend Paul Wheeler said, Pink Moon is about emerging out of depression and looking back. To me, it’s a perfect album because it’s not overly depressing. People describe it as depressing, but that’s not right. Some parts are joyful in a laidback, sentimental way. “From The Morning” is about taking beautiful things from the morning and placing them in the night. The album is about looking at past failures and losses of love, and seeing them with new maturity and acceptance of personal darkness. “From The Morning” is such a forward-facing song, even in its melody, and is a perfect closer. An entirely depressing and broken album would not be as influential or artful.
Nick recorded the songs for the unfinished album that would have come after Pink Moon while he was in a dark period, right before he died. You can hear the brokenness and deterioration in his voice. As he sings “I’m growing old and I wanna go home” on “Black Eyed Dog”, he does sound older far beyond his years. The songs don’t have the same effect as Pink Moon because he struggled to be coherent; “Rider On The Wheel”, for example, is bittersweet and devoid of meaning. But these songs are interesting in a completely different way. When you’re in the middle of a dark period, there’s a sincerity that you can’t recapture.
This idea that some emotional moments can’t be recaptured goes for all my art, even my drawings. I have some old art that should be technically worse because I’m always improving; but sometimes they have haunting qualities, due to what I was feeling at that moment, that I can’t recapture. I see this pattern of early art having an untouchableness in a lot of artists. It interests me that they may think their old art is bad because they’re not in that emotional state anymore, but it’s actually just amazing in a different way.
But like Nick, sometimes I write songs about past situations instead of what I’m feeling at the moment. Sometimes, the song can even come out more emotionally convicting when I’m looking at the situation through a new lens. Writing about my past mistakes makes me enlightened because I realize how I’ve changed and how everything shifted for the better. It even tells me that in the future, things might not be so bad, because I can look at the past and see how the now is easier.
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