Think of this short statement on art like Robert Irwin’s Notes toward a Conditional Art. That writing’s purpose was not presentational or communicative, but rather done as a way to organize his work. Only later were those writings presented as a collection, paired with some essays he’d made to be published. It’s a fantastic book! He’s very good at looking at art historically in terms of its developments in representation and abstraction.
In my case, the purpose is slightly more practical. I also wrote to organize myself—but would like anyone out there encountering my songs to have this writing available to them.
Statement on Current Intentions
When I was first starting out, I was especially interested in freak folk and making things that lyrically pushed a kind of Beat expansion-of-consciousness (a paradigmatic example of this sort of music would be Devendra Banhart’s Rejoicing in the Hands and Niño Rojo). I reeled back from that kind of free expression after a while and created more classically poetic songwriter works, songs that nonetheless dealt with consciousness and wrestled with feelings of detachment.
But for the last ten years or so, I’ve gone back and forth between writing more traditionally-structured songs and focusing on music philosophically. Generally, I’ve put much more energy into the philosophical aspect of writing than anything else, and I even went deeply into philosophy study itself—to the point of taking courses and applying to graduate programs. That was mostly around the philosophy of perception.
I should add that under the label of philosophical work I include the concrete practice of playing and writing. Just as philosophy grapples with questions that cannot yet be empirically or logically answered, I think I have been creating things and reflecting with little assurance of conclusions, i.e. finished work.
All the while, I’ve tried to put things out into the world in forms to which I could commit. Sometimes I’ve given up—let’s say, for the “time being”—on finding evidence of my inquiry that was worth displaying as art. At other times I’ve been comfortable. Now, as I reach a point where I can envision creating “works” from all this experimentation, I think it would be rewarding to lay out a few principles, or intentions:
—I want the song to be non-abstract
—Stories and repetition involve or invite abstraction more certainly than improvisation
—In these songs, there is no particular that is necessary, nor is there anything intended to be generalizable as “song” or essence
—The constituent parts are honed and practiced and a valuable instance of the singer/player’s spirit
—I want the songs to feel purposeful and explore existential meaning, not demonstrate meaningless-ness
—A good analogy to these songs is an athletic* event: there are conditions, practiced behaviors, and the potential for valued instances, particular and whole
*I haven’t read it, but Alva Noë’s book Infinite Baseball makes a similar analogy about art, I believe. I have read multiple of his other books, including Strange Tools, which I recommend passionately. I love his way of talking about figuring art out (understanding) and even explaining our early feeling of boredom in encountering a work for the first time.
