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 “Driving in the Rain” (demo):
This song was written on August 10, 2023
This is demo leak #70.
I
The other morning at the gym, I was listening to an interview with the great American poet and thinker Christian Wiman, in which he describes how years of engaging with his writing had eventually dragged him, somewhat unwillingly it appears, into his particular relationship with faith. When prompted to discuss how the sound of words had influenced both his poetic and spiritual disciplines, Wiman goes on to paraphrase a writing by poet Joseph Brodsky in which he says:
The ultimate fallacy of history, as we practice it, is this assumption of linearity within it, which makes it fundamentally false. He was arguing that poetry gets around this, surpassing it, because it’s embedded in sound and that those sonic currents are, in fact, the currents of reality. That a poet is plugging him or herself directly into the currents of reality and can speak about reality in a way that historians can’t.
Wiman continues about his own experiences of working with that very rhythmic and sonic language, which so often preludes a poet's or songwriter's more crafted verse, as well as what is possibly the most discussed (and excessively romanticized) aspect of the creative act: the idea that we as artists are frequently tapping into something from outside ourselves—a mysterious Morse code of sorts—that only unveils its true message at a later date.
I’ve always been, not simply obsessed with, but compelled by and haunted by, the sounds of words. I hear a poem, I hear what it sounds like before I have the words. I have the rhythm in my head, and the words slowly emerge to fit that rhythm. And I do think the reason that I became a Christian is because, for many years, poetry kept showing me this other reality in that sound. I would follow these sounds into these revelations that I didn’t make, and that seemed to come into the poem from outside of me, and seemed to make these sonic meanings far beyond what I could make. And I would just look at them and think, ‘Well, God, I didn’t do that.’
The concept of poetry bringing reality, or alternate realities, to the foreground through sound is attractive to a musician. The act of ‘following sound’ toward unsolicited ‘revelations’ is equally so, and it begs the question in my mind: is that prayer? Is holding anything within our unflinching attention—a story, a person, a melody, a God—what they call prayer? And can regular devotion to the creative act result in a similarly transcendent experience? In my opinion, yes.
So, how and why do we distinguish between such affairs of the spirit?
II
In August of 2023, I was in Normandy with a very pregnant Janis. Some friends had recently left, and others were arriving. Robbie Robertson had just died. Outside, the sun was setting a precedent, and everyone was on their way to the beach. Meanwhile, I was tied to the piano until I finished working out a new song idea.
Aiming to complement the somewhat haunting music I had written that morning, I pulled to mind a strange dream from the night before to serve as my lyrical inspiration. This, I felt, was a vague (and lazy) way to employ words that sounded evocative but did not contain much in the realm of meaning. One hour later, with another song in the bag, I recorded a demo on my phone and left the house to join in the summer gaiety.
As I listen back now, many months later, I am first drawn to the fact that I actually like the song which I had considered a throwaway—a quick sketch sung out on a summer afternoon. More so, as I re-read the lyrics, I am confounded by the apparent foreshadowing taking place in the opening verse, considering that one month after writing the song, unbeknownst to me, I would lose my mother. These are the lyrics I am referring to:
Last night I dreamt that my father wept
He stood on the porch in a raging storm
Calling his son as the kitchen floods
He’s all alone in a house of ghosts
I do not know why I had that dream or why I chose that imagery for my lyrics the following morning—it is something I rarely use in my songwriting—although a hard rain did fall the entire day of my mother’s death. Nor do I know what message, if any, is being revealed to me in revisiting it, especially now that my dad is living alone in a house where her ashes decorate their bedroom mantel. I do not know if I am simply adding undeserved value to my own imaginative ramblings, either here or in the song, or if a son who has consistently held his mother in his attention might one day sense, in advance, a severing of the tie that binds them.
I do not know anything, I concede, about anything at all. ◍
From the vault
What I’m listening to this week
What I’ve been reading
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus
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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