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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: smell the cheese

I've always felt uneasy about writing songs in so many different styles and for so many different reasons. Whatever I am presently working on always seems to be the only honest thing I've ever done and everything previous gets devalued. While working on my recent albums, which were about lost and unobtainable love, I had a hard time dealing with my album from the early 1990's, HOW FAR? HOW FAST? which was focused on positive images of loving relationships. I really turned on it and lost touch with the genuine emotional inspiration that had given birth to it. Then there are all the songs I wrote for the Disney Channel which I thoroughly enjoyed when I was writing them but no longer have any interest it at all. Whatever I am working on at the moment always seems to me to be my authentic voice, which means that everything else must be inauthentic. It is really difficult to deal with. So I keep looking for a way to bring all these things under one umbrella - me - which is where they all came from.

Lately I have been thinking about how songwriting fulfills several different functions for me and each of these functions determines how the final artistic work is shaped. When I use songwriting to make a living, I work within very tight parameters. Sometimes I work on assignment and the song is then shaped by whatever the requirements are. Other times, I am writing for a particular market - whether it's smooth jazz or new age or family entertainment - which determines the lyric and musical content. Sometimes I am writing to explore new territory or try out new songwriting tools. Sometimes I hear a beat that inspires me and makes me feel like singing something to it, or a group of words that bring an emotion to the surface. I suppose that last one's the most authentic voice but it bothers me that all my other work should somehow, then, be not-me. I don't think I've ever written anything I didn't feel, even when I was writing on assignment. But emotions change and somehow the ones I felt yesterday, but don't feel today, seem less honest, less real than the ones I feel right now. I wish I could find a way to keep honoring the work of the past but maybe that's just the part of being an artist. If we were satisfied with what we created in the past, we wouldn't need to continue making new things, pushing to try to say it all, even though we know we never will.

Copyright 2004 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.