The Little Plane
I think about “Little Plane” a lot. The sixth track of Simulation Avenue, I don’t know what really happened here. It has no real precursor in my catalog that may have suggested a song like this was coming. The closest is a song called “Next Stop” that I wrote for Something with Trees back in 2012 that never got recorded. But even then, “Little Plane” runs —or flies, I suppose—circles around that song.
I love “Little Plane.” I love the ambience, the sparse lyrics not unlike the feeling of flying through an empty, desolate sky. I love the vibrato setting that my amplifier had, and how my electric guitar sounded through it —like the music itself was feeling the vibration of the plane’s engine. I love the rasp of my vocals at certain points, and I love the four-note, electric descent in the instrumental bridge that brings the song back to its root. It feels like, arguably, the most realized piece of music I have ever composed. Yet, I feel I can barely take credit for any of it.
There is an old adage among artists that suggests we are simply the conduit for the work we create, as if a piece of art has always existed out in the cosmos, and we are nothing but the entity that brings it out into tangible reality. Even on my most mystical days (which is often), I don’t know that I believe that exact thing, but no matter how I push back against it, I can’t argue away just how inexplicable the creative process is sometimes. Things materialize from nowhere, fit together in ways your conscious mind couldn’t have ever dreamed, and, sometimes, in absence of any other viable explanation, you just get lucky.
It might simply reflect the immense complexity of our brains, and our capacity to rapidly link ideas, images, feelings, and words into an infinite number of ways. So as each piece of art comes together, line by line, note by note, brushstroke by brushstroke, our brains constantly refresh what the piece is. By the time you reach the end, you’ve hit the metaphorical refresh button a countless number of times. The first line or brushstroke may link with the second, but how can anyone predict how the first line or brushstroke will link with the sixty-fourth, or the three-hundred-and-nineteenth?
I think that’s why a finished piece of art can feel so foreign to its creator. Whatever it is must be grossly separate from what it was, or was supposed to be. Then the brain kicks in again, trying to reconcile those disparate ideas, again synthesizing something new. A vast majority of my song subjects were unknown to me at the time of their writing, but those songs all have a meaning to me now, long after their composition settled, and my brain synthesized a new meaning.
I can’t tell you where “Little Plane” came from beyond one line: “Just five more to fly.” A veiled reference to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, this line is in reference to the claim that Yossarian and co. need only to fly five more missions to be allowed to go home, which, like all things in Catch-22, is total nonsense. Why that line sparked an entire song, I haven’t the slightest, but the spirit of it seemingly endured, as I have had multiple people ask me if the song is about World War II. As that is where and when Catch-22 is set, I guess the answer is yes.
The image of the little plane was such a self-referential choice, which, in the spirit of this writing, I had no idea of as I was writing it. That “Little Plane” appeared on the first collection of songs I recorded myself, full of limitations, has always felt so incredibly appropriate that I can’t help but suspect that same mystical hand as being at the spigot. The little plane is my enterprise: Small, efficient, limited, but, ultimately, functional.