July 28th, 2011

Well, it has been a while since our last post. After our fantastical tour around the Pacific Northwest, we partied it up for a bit in Seattle and then dispersed to our homelands. Rimmy has been back home in Thailand, Jonas and Robby at home in Seattle, and I’ve been in New Jersey and DC.
I’ve been writing a lot of music lately, though not necessarily in structured song form, the way I’m used to. This process of writing in a more free-form style while also reading a lot of fiction (and especially Dostoevsky, who famously introduced a more stream-of-consciousness style to Russian lit) has forced me to confront this reality: writing a song is at its core very much the same as writing a novel. A great novelist doesn’t just tell a story; she/he uses a story and its characters to reveal something about our world. Novels are very particular, with particular people and particular events and particular themes, but the particularness and smallness of these details are exactly what make them universal and make them connect so strongly to the readership. In songwriting, we use the particulars of a song’s subject as reason for pause and reflection. We tell a story (whether linear or nonlinear), but we leave space for parentheticals, in which we explore the underlying truth that the story’s particulars speak to. In East of Eden, one of the most powerful characters is a servant, who doesn’t actually have much impact on the story itself. But the nature of his character as a Chinese servant who is astonishingly intelligent makes way for frequent reflection about the way that relationships and people work. The devil is often in the details, as they say, but I’d assert that humanity is in the details.