“Once Around the Block” - Badly Drawn Boy
(Words/music: Damon Gough, available on The Hour of Bewilderbeast, Twisted Nerve / XL Recordings 2000)

Even if my habits indicate otherwise (or, in this case, my readers), I like to think of myself as a creative person.  Like many creative minds (as opposed to concrete minds for the sake of argument), mine wanders a fair amount.  I spend a lot of mental energy (both conscious and sub-conscious) making connections between things, often leading me to re-imagine something as something else.  Over the past seven months, this blog became my primary hobby, so a lot of that idle mental energy goes towards these songs or the act of writing itself.  Naturally, these roads intersected, leading me to start pondering what my writing process would sound like – if I were to soundtrack a montage of me sitting at my computer hammering out one of these posts, what might I choose.  “Once Around the Block” feels like the best fit, perhaps because the snare drum sounds like a typewriter.  More importantly, it sounds like a typewriter working in an irregular rhythm – sometimes it locks right into the waltz-like rhythm on the track, other times it creates a polyrhythmic effect, and other times it sounds lost.

Listening to the song again this morning, I still hear the typewriter hammering away, yet I noticed for the first time that it feels slightly behind the beat, whether by design or just because it’s played with brushes rather than sticks.  Combined with the starts and stops, it almost sounds like the drums are chasing the rest of the band (or, for the sake of my metaphor, that the words are chasing the song).  This captures the purpose of writing about music (for me, at least) – taking a song and trying to get to the root of it, chasing the magic until it reveals itself to me.  These mini-revelations make the pursuit worthwhile – all of the sub-par posts, blank stares, and revisions morph from pain to payment when I learn something new.  Ideally, good writing strives to be like “Once Around the Block,” sounding effortless and light despite careful and precise orchestration.  Even Gough’s lyrics fit in with the act of writing – chasing infatuations, outrunning fears, striving for the perfect word, and ultimately starting over again.

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