Whose Bright Idea Was This?

The Bugs Are Always Out There

I hear they do for some people, but song ideas never come to me in dreams. Except once. I woke up shaken. Typed it into my phone and fell back asleep. When I got up that morning, I’d forgotten the idea but not the buzz it gave me. I bopped around all morning, but I waited until I got to the office to sit down and check it out….

Girl, you are just like a song
I want to drive around and listen to
with the widows rolled down.

Kindof a sweet, if jumbled, sentiment. Except also this was also seven years after Florida Georgia Line spent 24 weeks atop the Hot Country chart singing:

Baby you a song
You make me wanna roll my windows down
And Cruuuuuuuise.

So Brian Kelley, Tyler Hubbard, Joey Moi, Chase Rice and Jesse Rice win on a technicality, I guess, by being first and far superior. Jay Knowles would have to look elsewhere for his own song idea that day.

Apparently, great ideas can be difficult to come by.

But this is the sixth one of these newsletters I’ve sat down to write. It should all be a little easier by now.

Song Friend Ray Lotta thinks I’m funny like a clown.

Did I really think that? I didn’t really think that, did I? I’ve been a professional writer for… I’m searching for the phrase that makes it seem the most intimidatingly long… there it is… a Quarter of a Century. And while writing has become a lot of things over that time, “a little easier” is not one of them.

Sure, the kind (and interesting) things y’all have said in the official comments section as well in emails, texts, and calls from long lost song friends make me feel like I’m not shouting (pouting?) into the void. I appreciate all of it more than you know (unless you make stuff up for a living in which case you definitely do know.) And it makes it a little (a little) less terrifying to press send to the growing number of names, more and more of which I don’t even recognize (so also, thank y’all for spreading the word… you are my marketing department.)

But it sure as shit ain’t “a little easier by now."

Before I commenced this endeavor I spent, gosh, six months writing down ideas in my Notes app whenever they occurred to me and very quickly I had more than enough ideas to last me for at least two years. So I thought, “No sweat. Let’s go!”

I should have known. (Why didn’t I know? I knew.) Because sometimes, with the other Notes app list (ominously called THE LIST) I have for my day job, no matter how long that very long list is, every single song idea looks like the most ridiculous non-idea for a non-song that anyone has ever had ever in the history of Western music and I can’t imagine WHAT the bonehead amateur who wrote all these down was thinking.

And some days you don’t even want to look at the list at all. Because it just feels like reading a rundown of all of your future failures. (That’s not self-pity, that’s just the job.) So then you decide that maybe there really is no such thing as a good idea for a song. Or… maybe that means there’s also no such thing as a bad idea for a song, too? Or… maybe only the bad ideas are the good ones? Or… oy.

Welcome to the inside of my brain on any given Thursday.

Until one day in the midst of one of those spirals I had the liberating realization (or was it just a sanity-preserving decision) that all ideas are bad AND all ideas are good. So, unlike what we’ve been taught all these years, the idea, the initial hook or spark really doesn’t matter all that much. It’s the execution that counts.

It’s not the lightbulb, it’s the bugs that the lightbulb attracts… it’s all the tiny little thoughts and suggestions and notions and notes that swarm around the idea that matter.

Inventor/Top Liner Tom Edison has a hook you’re gonna freakin’ love.

Like, maybe we’re not a bunch of wannabe Edisons re-inventing the lightbulb over and over so much as excitable, grade-school entomologists trying to assemble an interesting and unique collection of moths and insects for show-and-tell this week.

And that unhelpful part of your brain (and/or your co-writer in a crappy mood) who just goes nope, nope, nope to everything? Beware! That ain’t nothing but a dang bug zapper.

So if you can resist your natural urge to zap, swat, spray or smush… or to run away squealing… who knows what you might find.

Is “I Can’t Make You Love Me” an unassailably good idea for a song? Wasn’t the earliest version a bluegrass kind of thing? Is that right Mike? Allen? That sounds like, at best, an unremarkable musical moment.

“He Stopped Loving Her Today” could have gone wrong in so many ways. It’s true greatness may, in fact, lie in the fact that it’s always inches away from going hilariously awry.

“Silver Wings” isn’t even an idea really. It’s just two resonant words stuck together. Then Merle Haggard started strumming and humming one afternoon.

“10,000 Hours”? Why would you set out to write a song based on the discredited theory in a success manual from a decade ago? Seems like an embarrassing waste of a day. But Two Billon streams and a frivolous copyright lawsuit can’t be wrong.

It’s such a liberating thought, isn't it? The ideas are just the light bulbs. It’s the insects that are the actual magic. So. Really. The search for the perfect lightbulb is over! You just grab one from the box, screw it in and flip the switch.

Then see what bugs you get. Nothing? Try a different bulb. Different lamp. Different spot in the room. Different day. But ask any entomologist, exterminator, gardener or picnicker. The bugs are always out there.

The bugs are always out there. You just gotta find what they are into today. Once you got that, they’re yours.

Song Friend Haley Joel Osment sees song titles.

You don’t believe me? All I had when I started writing this newsletter today was the sentence: “This is the sixth one of these newsletters I’ve sat down to write.” The bit about the lightbulb and the bugs? That came as I was writing. And, considering the fact that I’m about to press send to you all, I’m at least moderately pleased with the notion at the moment.

Wait. So “the lightbulb” was really just another bug the whole time????

Woah.

Eat your heart out, M. Knight Shyamalan.

And holy cow, just as I was proofreading I realized this is the SIXTH newsletter. Get it?

More bugs are always gathering.

Okay. I’ll stop typing now.

jay