Crickets and the 100-Song Milestone
I wrote my first song in 2009 --"Untitled", a rough, cringey affair concerning angsty teenage relationship fodder that I wrote more about last year. Earlier this year, I put the finishing touches on "Crickets" as it became the 100th entry in my songwriting catalog.
If I extrapolate those numbers out, I have been writing about six songs per year. I admit that feels a bit disappointing, but then it's also kind of difficult to look at 100 songs' worth of work that I had no motivation to write other than my own desire to write them and feel like "Wow, you're really blowing it, man."
Comparing the songs on either end of this 16-year spectrum seems like a mostly pointless exercise. Most of the observations would (hopefully) be obvious: The 100th song is better than the 1st; the 100th song is very different from the 1st. And if the opposite is ever true, I definitely have zero interest in knowing about it.
What is of slightly more value is to muse on how I feel about "Crickets." It should come as no surprise that almost all of my feelings about "Untitled" are negative beyond the general appreciation that I, like all of us, had to start somewhere.
"Crickets" was one of my more vulnerable attempts in recent years if only for the desire to try my hand at a moody, spoken-word piece --a style that I have come to deeply admire thanks to Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen, but also a style that I have almost zero experience writing in. I think I hear Cave the most in "Crickets," but I expect to write more songs like this. Beyond the challenge to take yourself seriously as an intense narrator (a big challenge for me, admittedly), I think the elements of the song work quite well.
As with most of my songs, "Crickets" started with something small and inconsequential: me getting annoyed by the crickets that set up shop underneath the front door where I couldn't get to them. But like almost anything, stare at an idea long enough and you can start to pull artistic value from it. And so "Crickets" meanders between that little moment and a few hypothetical, slightly more dramatic ones. I don't know that I "get" "Crickets," but it fulfills the criteria that I ask of almost all songs I like: It takes me somewhere.
I'll leave you with a spoken word piece from each of the above masters:
Tom Waits: "What's He Building?"
Nick Cave: "Steve McQueen"
Leonard Cohen: "The Goal"