I Make My Depression Work For Me!, or, memory as songwriting subject

I’ve spent the last 19 years writing songs almost exclusively about my own life. That means all of my important relationships, traumas, insecurities, desires, and disappointments have found their ways into my lyrics. I’ve been candid about things that have otherwise gone unsaid in my life, and to that end, I’ve used lyrics as a way to speak about difficult issues from my past—in ways which often obscure the inspirations behind the songs, leaving their meanings unclear, but still affording me a certain amount of catharsis. Today, I want to talk about using memory as a way to facilitate songwriting, going so far as to say that my memory itself is both a gift and curse.

All songs are records of memories to some extent, whether emotional records (lyrics imbued with certain feelings) or historical records (retellings of past events). More often than not, a good song is a mix of the two. My earliest song which was explicitly historical was 2003’s “Don’t Wait For Me” (no recording exists). I was 13 years old, struggling with both the recent arrest and year-long imprisonment of my father and moving out of my childhood home to a much larger house (made possible by my stepfather’s income, and which was something I very much did not want). The collision of these seemingly unrelated events caused me to reflect on how I’d ended up at that moment in my life and what were the defining events along the way. I wrote:

Hanging out, it's getting close to 3
Anniversary present: "Stay together for me"
How was I to know what was going on?
Only one in the bed tonight, "Why is daddy gone?"

I was a young child, maybe 4 or 5 (my memory fails me whenever it concerns dates), and it was my parents’ anniversary. I had a ream of that computer paper where the pages were all connected by those hole-punched perforated borders. I laid out a banner-sized strip of it on the hardwood floor of our living room and with sign-painters’ letter stencils and red crayon traced out: “STAY TOGETHER FOR ME”. Apparently I was a much more forward (I might even argue, “better”) communicator before their divorce. After that, their split became a blur. I don’t remember much else from that time, but it is clear that in the emotional haze of that trauma, my young brain decided that that moment alone was important and coalesced to give me a forever snapshot of me reaching out for help for the first time.

The song goes on in less specificity to describe having a good relationship with my mother after their divorce, before presenting the ominous lyric, “I was ready for what was in store/But what was in store wasn't ready for me”, referencing my mother’s eventual remarriage and what could only be described as a rather quick descent into severe depression and anxiety. Maybe I wasn’t ready after all.

I recount this early, very un-subtle experiment with using memories as the basis for my songwriting to say that while I cherish every song I’ve written, there has been a downside to archiving my past in such a way that requires me to retell painful anecdotes and continually process traumas in the form of performance. These aren’t journal entries which, once written, can be shelved and never seen again. I’ve made songwriting and performing my livelihood, meaning that in order to live in the present I have to relive the past. Is it my fault that I’m not making up stories to sing about instead? Maybe. But that was my choice and I’ve made peace with it. I don’t know that I would tell anyone anything about my past were it not for my songs, so at the very least, I can organize my thoughts and get them out of my head (a double entendre which takes on significance later).

There are many other instances of historical lyrics in my oeuvre: “Kid”, “The Kissing Tree”, “Song No. 11”; the list goes on. But more interesting to me than strict retellings of past events is the use of memory itself as a subject in my lyrics. The earliest example of this that I can recall is in “Madison”, a song about falling in love with my high school girlfriend while she was dating one of my good friends. (In retrospect, my friends were right when they told me it was a creepy song, but Madison loved it—we dated for two years—and that’s all that matters to me.) A couple of lyrics stand out:

And I'm not sorry
I won't feel bad about noticing
All the little things

…

I remember the time when
You let me put on your glasses
And I remember they fit terribly

…

Madison, I notice everything about you

I warned you it was creepy. Anyway. I can remember trying to take in every moment I happened to be around her. Madison sitting with us at the lunch table. Madison coming into my summer job at the library to read. I wanted to remember everything I could because I liked her so much that even if I couldn’t be with her, it was nice just to think about how great she was. (Seriously, what was wrong with me? [I maintain, however, that everyone does a certain level of this, so I don’t wanna hear anyone absolve themself of this kind of pining over another person.]) And while that strategy might have worked for me at the time and even during our relationship (when I would try to remember as many things as I could so I could really bathe in the experience of being in a relationship for the first time), it really backfired after we broke up. I couldn’t get any of it out of my head. I kept going over all those memories in my mind trying to make myself feel better, trying to figure out what went wrong. And after a while it broke me. That meant of course, in order to cope, I wrote more songs about her. You can see where this is going. It becomes a cycle. Once my thoughts congeal into song-form, there’s no going back. They live forever and perpetuate themselves.

I wrote “Out Of My Head” after my breakup with Madison. The last verse and chorus goes:

I've been reaching for someone I wanted
Not exactly one who I need
And I've been dying for all the love I put out
And all the love I want in my hands
But who would reach out to a man who's on
The edge of all the world he can stand
Keep my eyes closed is all that I need
At times it's all that I can

All that I can do
To keep from going
Out of my mind
Out of my head
Out of my head again
Nothing is the same
I think that sometimes
I am going crazy

And my wings are gone…

It’s a song about turning inward to process. And even though my songs are outward manifestations of that processing which are then consumed by other people, they still very much belong to me and feel, in the moments of their performance, like spontaneous flashbacks. Songwriting is all that I can do to keep from going out of my mind. So far, nothing else has worked as well, even with all its drawbacks and side effects. (The line about wings at the end is a reference to an earlier song, “Your Wings”, also written about Madison. So you see, it’s all self-referential, a universe unto itself which has spanned nearly 20 years, a universe in which I have chosen to live because the alternative seems to be worse.)

That brings me to 2016’s, “Jack & Jill”, the song which kicked off the EP of the same name. The story of that EP is pretty well documented, but in short, it’s about living in a world I created in my mind. Familiar territory. At the end of the song, I wrote:

Memory will be the death of me
But I can't seem to get my fill

That sums things up pretty well. My songwriting process has been successful in that it has resulted in an output of more than 200 songs, numerous albums and singles, a rigorous and constant performance schedule since 2006, pretty good money, and so many fans who have connected to my work. Where it has not been successful is that I find myself stuck in a loop of distressing and often intrusive memories which remind me of my own successes and failures (the latter more often than the former). Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Maybe that’s something a person who’s stuck inside of the system would say. You know how it’s hard to see anything objectively until you’re outside of it? Even if I don’t know what the alternative looks like—a career in music where I don’t write about myself, which I think means learning to write songs from scratch—I think there is a kind of objectivity in being able to put emotions into words, to take the psychological soup from inside my brain, pour it through the sieve of rhyme, form, and melody, and come out with an artistic consommé that answers questions I have about myself in a succinct and palatable way. Being able to nurture myself with this broth is solely how I sustain myself. Maybe it’s too much of a good thing, but I wouldn’t be alive without it.