Back to the Circle

These days when I sit down to write a song, I begin to wonder how I ever wrote a song, given how trite my lyrics seem to come out. Were they always this way? But if I keep going, more often than not, the song reveals and asserts itself. For this newsletter, I decided to return to lyrics I had jotted down half a year ago in my default sad girl mode. I was amused to discover that the song is actually a lighthearted duet—belonging to a musical about two overachievers unknowingly on the autism spectrum who fall in love.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sung a vocal duet. One of the last times was in school in New York City, when I performed 'For Good' with my kindly teacher Peter Eldridge. He expressed surprise over my conventional song choice, but it was an obvious pick for me as I love songs from Wicked. (And I have included a reference to The Wizard of Oz on my two albums as well as an unreleased EP.)

Until recently, I thought close friendships were “for good” in the sense that they were lasting. But I’m beginning to see that “for good” may be more like what the song says, doing life together for a season to love, learn, and grow with each other, then going wherever each of our paths lead us. Or maybe it’s cyclical.

Here’s another duet from a school recital for kicks.

A lifelong student at heart, I’m continuing to slowly go through The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms. I figured I had considered time in many different ways for my Orange Hour album and was stunned to read the following.

It didn’t occur to me that the timeline could be anything but horizontal! It could be up and down, with the future falling to us like a shower. It could be at any angle … and if we rotate the line around, hitting every degree within 360°, that would bring us back to a circle. It does seem like everything comes back to the circle.

A long-held theory of mine is that extremes meet in a circle. In college, I studied contemporary improvisation and was deep into the works of avant-garde saxophonists like Eric Dolphy, Ornette, and late Coltrane. In a graduate program known for straight-ahead jazz, I studied Dave Liebman’s method of playing “out” using chromatic harmony. At the end of it all, I concluded that free jazz and playing “out” sound basically the same. Two starkly different approaches when taken to the extreme get you to the same place.

When you swing to the far ends, you lose a lot of people along the way. That loss may be inconsequential in a niche field like avant-garde jazz, but it becomes tectonic in the realm of something like politics.

I’ve been going in circles, writing, deleting, rewriting, so I’ll leave it here for now.

🔊 I had spent many, many hours listening and singing along to the New York Voices and was excited to meet Peter and Darmon from the group as my graduate program teachers. I still love listening to Hearts of Fire, dreaming of big hair. (For daydreams of shoulder pads, I turn to Manhattan Transfer.)