I had some time off in a hotel in Denver this weekend and I got to do a little writing. I’ve accumulated a lot of ideas for new songs but I have next to nothing written on any of them. So I sat down in this hotel bar to give some ink to one of my ideas.

It’s a song about something one of my professors at Truman said about the theory of relativity. The lyric is, in my mind’s eye at least, sort of asymmetrical. The first verse is really short and the second is quite a bit longer, though I haven’t written it yet. I jotted down some phrases for a while, until I reached an impasse. Without any kind of tune, and no, I had none, I was lyrically shooting in the dark. I didn’t want to force the idea into some simple meter, like a nursery-rhyme. So I decided that I had better write some music to give the lyric something to follow. I sat there humming and thought up a little two note melody and some variations on it. Then my phone rang.

Later that night I was bored in my room. I decided to plug in my keyboard and try to flesh out the idea I’d had earlier. What I started playing had a different personality than what I’d heard in my head. It sounded like something from The Royal Tennenbaums. Or maybe I’m flattering myself. At any rate, I liked it a lot. But, again, it was nothing like my first idea. Same notes, completely different animal. I couldn’t imagine marrying the lyric with it, not even as an odd couple.

Here’s my point in sharing this with you. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life tells writers to keep a sledgehammer handy. When you reach an impasse, she says, it may mean that your entire premise is wrong and that you have to demolish what you thought was the cornerstone of your work. Writing a song isn’t nearly the committment that writing a book is, but the same thing applies. I’m not a very experienced writer, but I’ve had to use the sledgehammer. In this case, I was right at the entrance to the maze, with very little invested in either the lyric or the music, so it was an easy decision. Start over. WHAM!!

Lucky for me, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Look on the bright side; sledgehammers don’t destroy rocks, they make new ones. So now I have two songs. The “Tennenbaums” music will come in handy some day. For the time being, I’ve recorded it as a little vignette. (I recorded it in Reason, so it sounds a little canned, but you’ll get the idea.) You can listen to it at my myspace page. And, just like this was 90210, the physics lyric has already got a new girlfriend, a tune I’ve had in my back pocket since December. All is fair in love and war and songs about Einstein’s theory of relativity.