You can be as tired as you like. No one’s getting any sleep. The walls are high around these parts, but they’ve never been that deep. We can hear everything but it’s muffled and confused. I wasn’t listening anyway, I never was amused by how you don’t know much about what you don’t know much.
I dug up holes all around our house but you forgot to plant the seeds. Now they’re nothing but empty earth surrounded by air they don’t need. And they don’t need much like I don’t need you much.
We got married in April, blossoms on the trees. But winter comes eventually.
I never thought I’d think these thoughts; never realized thoughts like these exist. All we wanted was a beautiful life, but entropy resists. So I’ll pack my things before you pack your things before things get ugly round here.
(Words and music by Ryan J. Tressel)
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This is the tenth song for the RPM challenge (well, technically the twelfth, but there are two that will have to wait for the box set) and the fifteenth song written in the past month. I would be lying if I didn’t think that this would’ve been easier at the outset, that I could summon from the creative wellspring at anytime. And while I wrote and recorded more songs in the last 28 days than Axl Rose managed in the past 17 years, the jury remains out on how classic any of these tunes will remain. It was fun, and a good exercise for anybody who might be interested in songwriting. I spent a good number of years (roughly 2004-2007) nursing only a handful of songs one line at a time. Inspired by my friend and collaborator Jesse Thomas’s frgithening output, I decided to stop being so precious about the whole endeavor and to, in concentrated bursts, write and record a song a day over a set amount of time. It was immensely freeing, as a writer, to know that I could write whatever I wanted, follow any idea that occured to me, because I would need to do the same thing the next day. I’ve been writing songs for almost seventeen years now, and seriously writing songs for over ten. I think I doubled the number of songs I wrote between 1997 and the present in the last year alone. If out of the nearly 100 songs I’ve written and recorded since August 2007, only two or three end up being things that I decide to keep in the “Tressel Songbook”, that’s still two or three more that I added to it in the eighteen months prior to that. So, keep checking back here every couple of days, as I’m going to continue to record new songs and older songs and post them here until Internet v 2.0 goes crashing down in flames. Thanks for listening.
