On Songwriting
& Silver Bullets
The Writing Of “This Gun”
I was standing on some subway platform in Brooklyn sipping a too-strong ice coffee when the first line popped into my head. I can’t tell you where I was going or coming from because, frankly, I don’t remember – all I really remember is the coffee – but I can say with certainty that a one-night stand was not involved.
“Well I was kinda drunk when I woke up in a bed off Bedford Ave.”
The first words to “This Gun.”
I might have been a bit hungover, but it just sounded cool, okay? Something about the rhythm of it, the way “drunk” rhymes with “woke up,” how that makes you emphasize those hard, plosive sounds – I knew it was something. But it was just a flash, a little voice in the back of my brain who I was lucky enough to let speak above all the other sounds.
“thank god for this backpack filled with migraine pills cuz more tequila was all she had.”
If you’re interested in the line between fact and fiction, here’s a pretty representative sample as far as my life/songwriting goes: the sex was made up, the migraine pills were real. I carry a bottle of Excedrin in my backpack because migraines are the worst and Excedrin’s got caffeine, and, well, they come in handy.
So, I’m standing on a subway platform that problem wasn’t even “Bedford Ave” and I remember coming up with some second line about the cold brew I was drinking and then realizing it was all just a bit too hipster. So instead of downgrading the hipsterism, I leaned in: might as well make fun of it/myself while we’re here.
“With my blue jeans cuffed and my denim sleeves rolled up I was back out on my own”
Here’s some more truth: I wore a lot of denim in those days. I wear a lot less denim now that sweatpants are socially acceptable 7 days a week, and I’m not sure how quickly I’m going back. But, again, the line had that same kind of rhythm and internal rhyme as the first one. It was sort of slyly poking fun – at myself, at Brooklyn – and was my own little allusion to a favorite early Springsteen line “With my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet, silver star studs on my duds like a Harley in heat.”[1] You can tell where I get that ear for the rhythm and internal rhyme stuff, right? I’ve listened to a whole lot of Greetings from Asbury Park and it’s just become a part of how I hear words, how my brain grabs onto things. It even happens by accident when I’m writing prose. And so, if you’re interested in my songwriting process, that’s pretty much how it goes: my head hears something cool, I work with it for a few minutes, get in the zone, knock out another few lines, maybe even finish a verse...then the lights go out. And thus begins the soul-scratching work of looping words over and over and over and over again in my head until I finally figure out what the fuck to do with it all. This is songwriting.
I don’t have a process: I just have practice. Having so much practice running shit through my head round and round has its pros and cons: I trade hours-long insomnia for being able to write without an instrument nearby. Much more often than not I can just hear the line – words and melody – and that line implies enough harmony that later, when I’ve got some peace and quiet and I feel like tearing my flesh apart for an hour or so, I go grab a guitar and figure out what goes underneath it. I’ll play and play those same few lines until they feel right (it’s a feeling; you simply “know”), and whenever I get stuck I try to ask myself, “what am I trying to say?” And in this case, well, I seemingly had no idea because I sat on that first verse for about 6 months. All I got was one last line to finish it off.
“Funny how having no place to be doesn’t feel so free when there’s no place you call home.”
That’s another true one, and I think that’s why it took me so long to finish this song. I’d moved to LA, but I wasn’t settled there. I didn’t know what I was doing yet. So, I’d fly home to New York for a few weeks at a time, couch surfing with friends/my sister/my grandma, living out of that backpack with the migraine pills for as long as I could. I got good at living out of a backpack. I still am. But it doesn’t leave a lot of time for guitar playing or soul-tearing. And the truth of the matter is, I didn’t have an answer to that question, “what am I trying to say”...because I didn’t know. There was still some lesson I needed to learn.
It was a tumultuous time. I don’t know if y’all remember 2018, but fuck did it feel like the world was caving in. I know, we just got through 2020, so 2018 now looks like a plate of cupcakes, but at the time...jesus. No Bueno. I was freaking out, and I was goddam tired of it. No matter what I did, it felt worthless – and everywhere I turned, it felt like the things I knew were right and good were being overrun by everything I stood against. And I felt powerless.
“Well I hate how much I don’t know what I’m doing / and I hate how much I hate it being wrong”
Some more internal rhyme for you. We’ve all got habits.
“And I never meant to be so damn judgmental but you see / if I can’t make it here, can I make it on my own...”
There I was, freaking out about the world being on fire, hating everything I saw, protecting myself behind some shell of pretension and pseudo-intellectual ranting and raving. Everywhere I went I would end up ruminating and pontificating: The System was rising up around us, we’d all fallen off course, all the things I’d previously loved were now awash in institutional corruption. It was not an easy time to be my friend. But I was on to something. I just hadn’t found it yet. And that feeling of not having found it was, in fact, what was driving me crazy.
So, I sat on these words for far too long. I’m pretty sure at one point the note I had in my phone had all these lyrics followed by “[insert some badass magical tag line a la Dancing In the Dark”]. When I had enough of the tune to write out a chord chart for the band, the title read, “New Up-tempo Rock N’ Roll Song.” I had pretty much everything but the final line of the chorus. I was going on looooong walks when I should have been working my desk job, pacing around for hours just trying to find that one right phrase. It was agonizing. I was circling around it, but nothing quite fit. “Never leave a loaded gun?” “Time’s up, I’m gone?” “
What I’d needed to learn was patience. And the root of patience is trust in yourself, faith: faith that when the chips are down and you feel like you’ve got nowhere else to turn, there’s still something deep inside you that you didn’t know you could tap into, something that you don’t fully understand, even less control – but something that you know will pick you up and carry you when the only eventuality seems like giving up and going home.
“There’s one more shot in this gun.”
I’m sitting here now looking for that same thing. It’s been a pretty horrendous year to debut music, and, while I’m so grateful to have reached whoever of you is out there reading this right now...I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing. I don’t know where else to turn. And I ALSO don’t have the ability to just give up and disappear. But I know I’ve got something left. One last trick up my sleeve.
The song ends big and triumphant, but there are those last few ominous strains ringing out from the Prophet. I don’t know where I’m going; I believe that I will get there. And then I’ll have to start all over again. But if I just keep going, if I trust that process that isn’t much of a process but that I’ve honed over years of practice, the practice of a process-less process that has somehow worked for me, I’ll see that, soon enough, that silver bullet shoots true when it comes the time to let it fly. I’ll make sure to make it count.
[1] Name the song and win 5 internet points