Songwriting
“Put samba rhythm over fast blues riff.”
“Get deadlift to 300 lbs by December.”
These are the thoughts that occur to me at inopportune moments, like when I’m driving or about to fall asleep. A notion will pop into my head and I’ll stare blankly into nothingness for a split second, then whip out my phone and jot it down as quickly as I can. Though the words and phrases are mostly skeletal, jumbled, discombobulated, and nonsensical, when I read back over them, they make perfect sense.
Every song I’ve ever written is in my notes. Some of them are completely abandoned, still waiting for accompanying music; others are fully-developed, 6-minute long sermons on topics like love, war, ex-girlfriends, the inescapability of modernity, and that one time I accidentally ran over a rabbit. Along with lyrics, there are sketches of instrumental ideas—chord progressions: “Em7/B to Fmaj7 to Am7,” reminders to “mix keyboard part lower” or “re-record bassline.” And finally, the broader ideas which these instrumentals and lyrics culminate to–concept albums about human biological functions, descents into insanity, or Lovecraftian horror.
Accompanying my musical ideas are the smaller details I keep track of to stay organized. There are notes on how to start a retirement account, logistics for my record label, artists that I still need to listen to like Huun-Huur-Tu and John Cage, books I want to read like Naked Lunch and Quantum Mechanics and Experience, and new Brazilian recipes I want to try like escondidinho or feijão tropeiro.
One note says “0, 1 = vagina, penis”—a correlation I observed between male/female reproductive systems and computer binary. I was pondering post-structuralist philosophy and how the ubiquity of gender dichotomy in the human psyche probably affected the development of our numerical system. I got excited to further explore this by investigating the history of Arabic numerals and sexual iconography. (I think I’ve been reading too much de Saussure.)
Right below that missive, I find the explanation I concocted for why spheres have the lowest surface area to volume ratio. I visualized polyhedrons as sets of intersecting lines, and spheres as having infinite lines, where each line is the shortest possible distance to its intersection, thus eliminating any inefficient usage of surface area. My notes are full of all the diagrams I draw to visualize concepts like this. As an aspiring astrophysicist, I expect this will help me understand physical models such as Higgs fields and spacetime dilation as I embark on higher level science.
My notes aren’t all so cryptic–there’s no shortage of daily musings: Buddhist teachings, hilarious things kids said at work, D&D-style alignment charts my friends and I devised for our classmates, angsty comments on heartbreak, offbeat observations on the differences between my homelands of Brazil and the United States (including a comment on the Vonnegutian irony of a Brazilian trash can plastered with the words “everything will be okay”), and thousands more platitudes and quips that have probably occurred to many people, but which I had the conceit to to write down regardless.
No doubt 90% of all these notes are dead ends, just poetries concocted by a romanticizing, hormone-ridden brain—but once in a while one of them leads to something…be it hours of having my brain melted by online MIT lectures on Quantum Mechanics or months of recording an album based on a dream I wrote down.
Ultimately, the notes are born less out of a contrived pursuit of intellectuality and more out of a compulsion I have—that is, I write things down so that my emotions and rationalizations and experiences will outlive me. The smallest thought conceived as an opposition to meaninglessness could one day blossom into a work of art or scientific discovery that renders human insignificance minute in the face of human achievement. My notes are just my tiny contribution to the not so tiny mark we’ve made thus far.