I’m waiting to step inside the idea chamber, as soon as it’s hot enough. At the moment I need lots of ideas: A song is trying to make its way out of my brain again, and it will nag at me day and night until it’s finished. Having struggled for years trying to figure out where ideas—lyrics, melodies, solutions to problems—come from, I have decided they come out of the shower head in my bathroom.
My left-brain sighs at this thought, but I ignore the sound, because it’s my right brain I’m trying to contact, and logic is the last thing I need right now.
There are, I think, several hundred original songs in my head. Only about forty are written, and getting to the rest is like groping for a faucet handle in the dark. Sometimes I find the handle and an entire song squirts out, sometimes I get just a line or two, but mostly the faucet drips a word here and there on its own, hints to get me started—hints that are very easy to miss if my antennae aren’t up.
The shower is where this virtual faucet lives most of the time; perhaps the sensation of turning the real faucet is what starts the process. I refuse to question it—even analyzing it feels dangerous to me.
At present, I have only a title—Homonym Girl—and I’ve put a burden on myself by decreeing that each line must contain a homonym. I have no idea what the song is about yet.
As I step in and close the shower curtain, the sound and feel of water clear my mind of all thought for perhaps 20 seconds, and a line appears:
I bend like a reed with the current in the sea of her dreams.
I don’t know what it means, but boy does it sound good. And it contains not one but four homonyms:
Eye bend like a read with the currant in the see of her dreams.
I know even less what that means, but I decide all the lyrics will be printed as homonyms on the CD booklet if I record this.
I open my eyes and wait. The opaqueness of the shower curtain reminds me of a word: glassine. I step out of the shower and dry off enough to get to my dictionary. Glassine: “semitransparent paper.”
“Glassine,” I say out loud a few times, letting the word bounce around as I cross my fingers, right thumb on top. Most people—me included– cross their thumbs the same way by habit. Crossing them the wrong way throws me off a bit, gives me a new perspective. Other tricks I use are writing with my left hand or putting my shoes on the wrong feet. The thumb trick is enough, thank goodness, to pull out another line:
I peer through her green glassine window, she’s not what she seems
Which becomes, in Homonymland:
Eye pier threw her green glassine wonder, she’s knot what she seams
Five homonyms! I’m on a role.
Or not. Blocked again, I realize this is going to be a long task. It occurs to me that this is what the song is about: Homonym Girl herself is hard to understand. She reveals herself only in code, and the song-as-code is about deciphering her code.
Back to the shower (I’m going to be a very clean songwriter today), which shakes out:
Aye listen in vein to her crypt tick and mist tickle code.
Then it’s out of the shower again and to my thesaurus, where I lose myself for an hour rambling through sections on codes and language. This yields the most marvelous word “isogloss,” a boundary line of linguistic features, just what Homonym Girl (she now has a superhero costume) would employ as her secret weapon:
Isogloss on a black velvet trip tick, pure antipode.
Only one homonym, and only a linguist would understand this line, but the black velvet triptych has a nice Elvis-painting imagery going for it.
Now I need a chorus, and I already have a melody filed away that will fit the song, so I stop the showering and do a quick recording (drums, guitar, and bass), singing the words I have and humming the words I’m missing. Listening to this while driving around town the next few days yields:
Spellbound and tide to her, penned down and theirs know cure
Spin the preying machine, tell me what does she mien, what does she mean?
Homonym Girl.
It takes two more shower sessions and a long van ride for the last verse:
The dye has been caste, couldn’t fight it, beg for seconds and thirds
I walk up the stares to the platform, hang on her words
Invisible sines, sotto voce, confusion abounds
I open my ayes though I no she’s know wear to be found.
Rhyming “sotto voce,” even imperfectly, seems a bit cheeky, but I leave it in.
Having spent this much time on the song, I’ve lost all objectivity. I’m just glad to be through with it, and I savor the satisfaction of “having writ” before the faucet drips and bothers me again.