Dharma
Songwriting and the Dharma - wake me up before you go-go.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Entire article, now the lead story on http://shambhalatimes.org/Here is an excerpt:
I suddenly saw many of my past songs in this light. I was writing these dharma songs for years, and not had a context to put them in. A song I had written a few years earlier, "Stress" was a funny tune about forever keeping busy, at an increasingly insane pace. The song showed a person stuck in their suffering, comfortable in an unbearable situation, and yet, it could be any of us, living in the modern workaday world. A song about suffering became a song about liberation from suffering, because we could see it, and identify with it, and then point, and laugh. Another song called "the world of particulars" was a song imagining a time between death and birth, and viewing one's sadness from that perspective. Instead of being funny, the song was trying to coax open the heart, encourage a softer approach to personal pain. I found a mission for my art. It was possible to write songs that could gently shock us more awake instead of lulling us into a self-centered delusion.
In a music world full of candy, I wanted to write spinach.
