organizing an accident is a weekly newsletter where I leak home demos of unreleased songs, first draft lyrics, thoughts on the creative process, & dispatches from music life in Paris.
Listen to “After I Die” (demo):
This song was written on July 16, 2020
This is demo leak #71.
Q: What is your mother tongue?
As I have gotten older and taken the plunge into both my thirties and the great reflecting pool of fatherhood, this question and similar ruminations about who I am and why I am have become the constant soundtrack of my life.
Although our given language is rarely a trait that we feel the need to extinguish, other seemingly innate and consequential aspects of our character do tend to loom like shadows we can never outrun.
Our earlier decades are typically spent searching—outwardly declaring independence from the environments that shaped us. But as time passes, we often experience a slow acceptance or even satisfaction with the heavy braids of nurture’s fabric that hang upon our shoulders, where interlaced within them are all the elements of our early existence that now incline us one way or another.
What is your mother tongue?
My mother tongue is books.
Catholicism.
Italian-American patois.
It is prime-time television and Saturday morning cartoons.
Second-hand station wagons
And compact discs.
My mother tongue is boredom.
Bleachers and back yards.
It’s Kiss from a Rose on a— and Hold me, like the River Jordan.
Inferiority complexes.
Drawing from the heart.
Skateboarding, street hockey, and the 90s Bulls.
My mother tongue was originally interpreted by action figures.
On the back porch.
Or at the community pool in summertime.
It was mom and dad’s love,
And lack,
And cats.
My mother tongue is anxiety.
Writing aimlessly.
Macaroni and gravy.
It’s being less broke than them but—
Addiction, or rather, escapism
And amateur poetics.
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From the vault
What I’m listening to this week
What I’ve been reading
George Orwell - Why I Write
Check out my previous demos and writing via the Substack archive + discover my official music releases on Spotify, Apple, or your platform of choice. Find me on all socials at @thisryanegan.
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