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02.16.12 : Soundtrack to a Soundtrack

A few days in a row, now, of staying in the house. A few phone calls as human interaction. I’ve been spending most of my time thinking, reading, walking my dog, and of course working on songs.

Yesterday was a very dramatic day. Some extreme highs and a couple of extreme lows. It was exhausting. Not good, not bad, just exhausting. It takes a lot of energy and burns a lot of calories to go through extreme emotional swings like that. I know I’m being cryptic; the details aren’t what matters as far as this post is concerned.

The other day I said I really enjoy spending time by myself. That’s true, in the sense that after being around other people all the time, it’s nice to have some “me” time to do as I please and just be myself. But that doesn’t mean that I want to be alone. I think the past couple of days have given me an idea of what it would feel like to really be alone, to live alone not knowing my neighbors, not having friends or family nearby, not having a partner who loves me and cares about my well-being. I joke about wanting to live alone in a cabin in the woods; well I need to stop joking about it, so that it doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

People need other people. We need to feel that connection, so that we feel like there is a reason to keep moving forward, keep trying to survive. And it’s important not to rely on just one person for that connection; no, we need to be surrounded by many different people with whom we can share many different types of connections. This is something I’ve been missing these past couple years of running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I don’t have that sense of support, a handful of people who know me and can meet me on a whim for lunch, or take me out when I’m feeling down. I miss being part of a group, a community. I miss hosting dinner parties and poker nights. I long for an evening with a girl friend of talking and drinking wine and watching silly movies.

On the other hand, this alone time has really opened my eyes to a few (more) personality “flaws” — or should I say “disadvantages” — of mine that I don’t think I truly recognized until recently. I had a minor breakthrough about this yesterday, in the midst of all those highs and lows. Another realization I had yesterday was that I have not been eating enough food or getting enough sleep or drinking enough water during this first week of The Florida Sessions, and for someone who is always on the brink of a chemical imbalance, this is actually a very big deal. I have the food, the time and the liquids; I just wasn’t getting as much as I should have been. I think I did a bad job of scheduling my days, and I’ve been starting the recording process just before dinnertime each night, only to get lost in the process and find myself full of adrenaline at 11pm not feeling hungry and being so exhausted from the creative process that I just go straight to bed, missing dinner.

So today I started to change all of that. I made sure to eat breakfast with my coffee this morning; I read for quite a while and even worked on a couple of poems, which I haven’t done in a very long time; and then I started recording today’s song around noon, rather than the usual 7 or 8 o’clock. I finished in time to walk the dog, take a shower, and actually prepare an entire meal for myself for dinner, salad and all!

Recording during the day brings up a lot of new factors that are missing from nighttime recording sessions. These factors could easily work against me, but I decided today that I would embrace them and make them part of the process. Plus, I wanted to capture the sounds that make up the soundtrack to my time here. Enjoy!