Collage by me, 2026.

About once every 3 - 5 weeks, I get my lashes and brows tinted. I always see the same technician: a Russian woman roughly my mother’s age who tells me I am “very welcome” every time I thank her. This is a small thing I do for myself to feel like a human adult woman without putting too much effort into it. But anyway, I am not here to talk to you about that.

What strikes me most is that her process seems different every single time. I have been doing this regularly for years now, and every week … I swear. Sometimes she turns the lights off when she leaves the room for several minutes while the color takes, others she merely dims them.

There are these little paper sheets that sit under your eye so the tint doesn’t get on your skin. Sometimes she puts them on with vaseline underneath. Other times they go on slightly damp. Still others, they’re completely dry. Sometimes she’s chatty (how much she hates bears, conspiracy theories, Russia’s great beauty) and sometimes she almost nothing.

This most recent visit she spent a lot of time with what felt like Q-tips pushing excess tint off my eyelids and I couldn’t stop imagining a handful of mice tending to me. *shrug*

To be clear, and I don’t think this is very astounding, the outcome she arrives at is the same every single time. Obviously. This woman is a professional. But her process, it varies.

It used to worry me on some level, the varied process, until this most recent visit when I realized: She is working with what she has to achieve an outcome she knows by instinct when (and only when) she sees it.

And fuck does it make me want to be an artist in the same way.

Oh winter! Has one month passed? Have two? A long time ago I learned I couldn’t count1, so I don’t know. Winter has moved from feeling merely inevitable to being intensely present. Cold skies make days seem shorter and self-contained. A (true) sense that there is nothing beyond this moment emerges. My mind feels like a windscreen cracked with frost.

I have an aspirational image: I am sitting in the front room of my apartment, surrounded by books and the perfect amount of warm, yellow light. I have eaten vegetable soup, and now am further heating myself with camomile tea. In my hands is my guitar and I am writing a brilliant song.

This has not been my winter.

I spent its first weeks in Brisbane—a decidedly anti-Winter kind of spot—and wrote no songs. Instead, I got ‘pissfit’2 and ate pub food in the sun. Now I’m back in Brooklyn for this frigid middle, and also writing no songs. I guess I’m just too cold.

With this in mind, for February Song Club I’ve concocted a warming ritual to get the songwriting bloods flowing again.

Sounds good and fun right?

Okay!
Lucy

i. Warming Ritual

Mull - Steep or simmer or warm a concoction dear to you. Perhaps chai, or perhaps Glühwein? It’s preferable that it be on a stove top.

Move - Put a song on the stereo3. You should desire swaying or gentle head nodding in response. ‘I Sing In Silence’ by Goat is a good choice. So is ‘Coconut’ by Harry Nilsson4. Whatever it is, you put it on repeat, okay?5

Step - Select your vessel and pour until filled with desired amount. Hold your vessel tenderly in both hands. Turn your gentle movement into more of a stepping motion. Be careful. You don’t want to spill. I’m telling you now!

Sip - With all necessary caution, bring the vessel to your lips and drink. Repeat three and four until warm.

Glance - Just out of the corner of your eye, sneak a look at your writing instrument6. How do you feel towards it? Repelled or compelled? Just notice for the next minute or so.

Chance - Whether repelled or compelled, pick up your writing instrument. Use the rhythm of the song. Strum, thump, type, write to it. All you must do is move your hand(s). Continue until you find your own rhythm and meaning.

ii. Artifact

Honestly, sounds kind of good!

iii. Song

As I said, I haven’t been writing, but I did take the time to record these cockatoos in Thirroul. You’re welcome.

Collage by me, 2025.

Time is a ride you cannot get off1, but it is a ride you can slow. I slow time by marking it. For much for 2025, I kept a daily journal. Just a couple of lines about one thing that happened: a funny thing someone said, or a delicious thing I ate for dinner.

In the middle of the year, my partner and I sat down and shared what we’d written. For each day, we picked one small detail and wrote it on a giant wall planner we keep in our kitchen. Looking back across the first half of the year, our life felt more densely packed than it had living it. Time expanded. I felt pleasantly lost in it.

In 2026, I’m trying a different journal experiment to mark time: keeping a sound journal.

I had initially thought to do this by using my voice notes app but then I realized that analog is back, baby! It’s 2025 and we have never been more nostalgic for the 90s. I plan to use one of these bad boys:

The experiment will be to record ~20 seconds of audio every day until a tape is full (two tapes per year). Then, at the end of the year listen back to this sort of sound tapestry, one day’s recording bleeding into the next day and into the next.

I don’t know what this will do to my sense of time. It might be disorienting. It might be toxically nostalgic. It might do what the written journal did and make time expansive. Whatever it does, I believe it will be wild and delightful to listen back.

Because of this, I’m inviting you all to join me in this funny little experiment.

Imagine! A distributed, analog archive of our collective years, each entry listened to perhaps only once by one person. There’s something so pointless and magical about that.

Join me?

<3 Lucy

Hi friends,

Did you catch it? The cadence of Song Club has shifted. At least for now, as I continue to experiment, we’ll be shifting these emails so they come out on the first Saturday of every month. I know: WOW.

One reason for this has to do with the fact that I want to find a manageable cadence for folks to ingest the prompt, soak in it, work on a song, rework it and ultimately feel more confident sharing. It also means you’ll write 12 songs if you follow along.

Another reason for this has to do with wanting to make more space in this effort for gathering, both virtual and in person, here in NYC. Slowing the Song Club publishing cycle will make room to be more deliberate about this.

So, for now, what you can expect a Song Club email on the first Saturday of each month. These will include:

• A new song prompt

• An artifact to augment your writing

• My song from the previous month

I’ll also be posting weekly reflecting and other threads in the Substack app, using the Chat feature. It will be cringe and stilted at first, but if we all be a bit brave and share soon it will gather steam and feel non-cringe and un-stilted. I can almost promise.

Sounds good and fun right?

Let’s go!
Lucy

i. Prompt

Think of someone who evokes big emotion in you: someone who makes you feel misunderstood, or angry, or insane with lust. Just needs to be big, meaty feeling.

Grab a pen and paper and start writing to yourself as though you are them. Try to get inside their head and heart and express what you think they think of you. Spend at least five minutes writing.

With an instrument, or without, start singing through what you’ve written down. Just try to find the melody in each of the phrases or sentences, and see what unfurls.

ii. Artifact

I hadn’t seen the video for this song until this week. It’s wild.

iii. Song

The upsetting and true story about this song is that I wrote the first two verses and chorus, and then the first verse happened. Feel free to respond directly in the comments or to the email and lmk what you think!

Collage by me, 2025.

In New York, we have fallen back. It’s dark all the time. Even the trees are a sunset. I actually saw the first batch of leaves in bags today, as I walked through Prospect Park. I tried to feel grateful for them. I looked at those bags so intentionally, and I said ‘WOW! Thank you, bags!” But honestly my heart wasn’t in it. I was (am) feeling anxious, listless, and bleak. This is how I find myself as I consider the idea of a ‘dancing animal’.

The idea is not mine; it’s Vonnegut’s, from an interview in Inc’s 1996 Technology issue:

“We are here on Earth to fart around … Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something [Gets up and dances a jig.]”

He is talking about computers and reasons to be wary of them. He is not directly offering advice for somatic alleviation. But it’s such a nice reminder: we are meant to be in our bodies.

It’s just so easy to forget the fact of our animalness. I do not get mad at the park turtles that they sit on rocks all summer and now they are sleeping underwater and breathing through their butts1. I am not mad at the swans for being bitchy and beautiful about their babies. I am not even mad at the leaves for needing to go away for a little bit.

But I am mad at myself for being seasonal: for having days where the best I can do is attend to the bare necessities. I have more in common with a daylily, a cherry blossom, a barn swallow over the Sahara. And yet, I treat myself like a computer: an object designed to do the same thing, in the same way, any time I ask.

There is a reasonable amount of writing and discussion about how the computer as metaphor for the brain is flawed. As early as the 1950s, neuroscientist Karl Lashly wrote:

Descartes was impressed by the hydraulic figures in the royal gardens, and developed a hydraulic theory of the action of the brain. We have since had telephone theories, electrical field theories and now theories based on computing machines and automatic rudders. I suggest we are more likely to find out about how the brain works by studying the brain itself, and the phenomena of behaviour, than by indulging in far-fetched physical analogies.

Honestly, TYSM Karl! I love hearing this. Because my brain is a terrible computer. But it’s a pretty marvelous brain. It’s the brain of a dancing animal—a dancing animal that really loves to dance, at that. And just one last thought here my friends, I have literally never seen a computer dance.

So, what to do with this?

This week’s mission is an invitation:

When you are wondering what you should do, or if you should do more, or if this or that is enough, answer the question by asking a different one: what would a dancing animal do? And then let the answer come up at you from the ground, or from your stomach, or sideways from the air and just go with that—whatever a dancing animal would do, do that.

I’ll be bopping over here,

Lucy

Collage by me, 2025.

The photograph is of a portal made of rocks, stacked rocks. I say ‘portal’. It is a circle facing the air. I can only presume stepping through it will take you to the place you see beyond.

The caption on the photograph: A mystery artist has been creating sculptures using natural stones high among the hills of England’s Lake District. This stone circle frames the view of Borrowdale.

Mystery Artist?!? What an exhilarating concept!

I have always been drawn to secrets and mysteries: hidden spaces, impossible questions, unknowable things. I grew up reading the Famous Five. I was briefly obsessed with the 1990s computer game Eagle Eye Mysteries. In high school, I put anonymous flyers featuring macabre haikus on all the campus noticeboards. Back when it was the thing one did, I briefly hosted a speakeasy in a warehouse. So.

It’s worth noting: not every silly little secret thing I’m talking about is the same. Some we wish to remain hidden. Others we want to reveal. Secrets are for keeping. Mysteries are for figuring. When we have information we wish to withhold we don’t want to be discovered. When we want to discover something, we hope nothing is withheld.

And this distinction is the (tantalizing) point of this memo: to have secrets as an artist is to dabble in both sides. To be both intensely public, and intensely private.

For instance, what I loved reading about ‘Borrowdale Banksy’ is that any one of the handful of hikers interviewed about the art could have been the artist. All claimed *not* to be, but of course a mystery artist would do that. Imagine the thrill!

Does one need to have secrets as an artist?

No.

Heavy pause … no.

BUT BUT BUT

There is some powerful energy in knowing something no-one else does. To make things and put them in the world, to have people experience your art without knowing it was you … there’s a real electricity to that.

My hunch is if you were an artist making both non-mystery and mystery art, the electricity from the mystery art would flow into your non-mystery art making.

It’s just a hunch. A hunch I thought I’d turn into a small secret mission, for whomever dares to accept it.

THE MISSION

Make a piece of mystery art this week. You don’t have to be an artist. The idea here is simply to put something beautiful, or interesting, or unusual in public view, in a place you might not expect to encounter it. You could make a drawing and put it in a library book. You could buy a little figurine and stick in a garden. You could write a macabre haiku and stick it on a noticeboard when no-one is looking. Anything!

I’m going to do it too! Maybe more than once.

Have fun being weird and secret,
Lucy

Dear friends,

I had forgotten the art of writing good song prompts last week. I’ll be honest. I tried it and found it infuriating. No song from me this week, and it’s my own fault. Here’s the secret—I’ll tell you for free: any song prompt worth its salt will give you a really practical place to start, an easy and specific action that sort of tricks you into getting started. It’s probably science. Thankfully, this week I remembered the art.

Here’s the prompt:

Start by writing. Pen and paper, mind you. Get the fuck off your phone, bb. I mean it. Look inside yourself with honest eyes: what about your daily life do you simply, truly, faithfully adore? Write it all down. Start with I love … and roll from there.

Once you have finished your list, go back through it and find your favorite line. This line is now your refrain. Start your song from this place.

I’ll be sharing what I write in the next newsletter. That’s a promise. I hope you do too!

All of it,
Lucy

Hi friends,

It’s week two of new Song Club and we’re headed in a vastly different direction from last week. We’re going to be playful, and silly, and indulgent. I can’t wait!

Here’s this week’s prompt:

Everyone has soapy teen dramas they loved from their youth. Loved, or loathed but watched anyway. They were full of crushes, romance, big feels, scandals, and they always had iconic credits music.

This week, your task is to write the song that would accompany the soapy teen drama of YOUR adolescence. Spend some time free writing down the dark passages of your memory and the distant past. What kind of show would yours have been? Straight up drama like Dawson’s Creek (aging myself here) or maybe something with a fantasy overtones like Buffy? Whatever it is, write a theme song for it that would make you bop around and get all excited during the credits.

I’ll be sharing what I write this weekend. I hope you do too!

Godspeed,
Lucy

MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE PROMPT

I wrote this prompt and I really, really resisted what it asked as me. I think this much is evident in the song. It’s a little glib. I’m only taking parts of that tiny voice, the vaguest parts, and sharing them. Honestly, I might try it again when I’m in more truthful a mood. I think it’s a decent prompt and this song doesn’t really do it justice.

If anyone tried the prompt, I would love to hear in the comments how you found it. If you’re feeling brave and have a recording you can share with me, I’d love to hear that too.

With love,
Lucy

Hi friends,

Song Club is back! Back with a new, shorter format and totally free. I’m excited for this because more important to me than a very small number of paid subscribers is building a songwriting community where folks from all over can write more together and share their works in progress. More on this as it unfolds, but until then …

Here’s this week’s prompt:

Everyone has a little voice in the back of their head they tend to ignore. It’s a voice that tells you things about yourself and the world you hope to hell aren’t true. It’s a voice reminding you of a deeper reality: a voice that says ‘no, I’m actually really hurt and scared by that person’ or ‘wow, maybe I’m the jerk here’. What ever it’s saying, it tends to be a small and quiet truth teller.

This week, write a song using things that little voice in the back of your head says. Get very still. Listen very gently. Coax out the truth, and see what kind of song is suggested. This is confronting work, so be tender with yourself. And but also, as my heroes Natalie Goldberg would say, ‘go for the jugular’.

They’re just words.

I’ll be sharing what I write this weekend. I hope you do too!

Godspeed,
Lucy

Hi everyone,

Had you noticed it’s been a while? I wonder. It has though. It has been some time since I sent a Midnight Voice Memos newsletter, either Song Club or The Midnight.

Truthfully, I didn’t mean to stop for this long. I just did one week and I haven’t known how to start again. I haven’t had anything I wanted to say.

While no newsletters have been sent out, I have been thinking about Midnight Voice Memos. I’ve been thinking about what it is, and what I wanted it to be—what I want it to be.

Originally, I imagined Midnight Voice Memos as abstract creative advice in collage form. I couldn’t find any songwriting content that sparked my interest online and I wanted to make something beautiful and mysterious that folks might want to really dig in and rifle through.

I don’t believe that Midnight Voice Memos is NOT that. But I also don’t believe it is. Not quite how I envisaged it anyhow.

Last month, I read How To Build The Good Internet from Matt Klein’s Zine. It exploded my imagination when via it I discovered the Tiny Awards, and remembered a time when using the internet meant, for me, checking a bunch of small sites (from Post Secret to Television Without Pity) or sifting through music blogs for interesting new stuff to download.

Recently, A Gen Z-er asked me if the internet of 2005 (which is approximately the time I’m describing above) was as idyllic as they’d been lead to believe. I had to say yes. It totally was. I miss that internet.

Also recently, I’ve been reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine. TL;DR it will make you resent the music industry and question the commercialization of music in any capacity.

Between these two ideas and, frankly, the current era/state of techno-fascist surveillance, I’ve been questioning how I want to share the things I make.

I feel like a sucker making beautiful Midnight Voice Memos content for Instagram in order to build an audience that’s captured there and largely doesn’t see my posts.

Over here on Substack, I’m having moral qualms too. It’s no particular secret that very questionable creators stay platformed here. This makes it an ecosystem I feel pretty rotten existing within, let alone contributing to.

All this leaves me with a sense that Midnight Voice Memos needs to disappear into the mountains for a season and shape-shift a little.

I need to spend time thinking about what platforms I want to be a part of and how I want to use them. I need to do the work of rebuilding the Midnight Voice Memos ecosystem. This means time, and a break.

I’ve paused paid subscriptions indefinitely, so if you’re one of my handful of paid subscribers: thank you! You’re free for now. I’m also working to make all paid content in the archive free.

I’m going to return in the fall with a new approach, new ecosystem, new publishing schedule, new idk what.

NEW STUFF ALL ROUND!

It’s going to be weirder. It’s going to be wilder. It’s going to be truer.

Love,
Lucy

Here is an idea that came to me via a friend who has worked with a lot of famous, successful musicians1. It’s called a box of tricks. And everybody has one.

In any box of tricks there is probably:

• your well-honed, winning techniques (go you!)

• your preferred song structures and melodic motifs

• your musical crutches and knee-jerk go-tos

• a bunch of other things

Your box of tricks contains the creative choices you mostly tend to make—for whatever reason.

Btw, there’s nothing wrong with a box of tricks—not having one, nor using one. It’s how you show yourself to the world; it’s the honing of your voice. BUT it’s also how you start to sound stale.

Which is why this week I’m sharing a five ways to break the box.

Crack it wide open,
Lucy

‘Entry Points’

#1

Melody: Pay attention to how you construct melodies. What intervals do you tend to use? Do you tend to write long or short phrases? How often do you repeat melodic phrases in a verse or chorus? What’s your approach variation? Take note, and experiment with making the opposite choice.

#2

Structure: When and how to do you vary the length of your verses? Do you use pre- or post-chorusses? What are your instincts when ending a song? Do you write long or short intros? Notice your patterns and play with reversing some.

#3

Singing: How do you tend to sing? Using your upper register or lower? Breathy? Resonant? Big open mouth, or minimal lip movement? Try copying other singers with really different styles — it doesn’t have to be good. See what comes out if you let yourself sounds different, or even ugly.

#4

Pronouns: I write in the first person a lot. I sing to “You” a lot-usually to another, but sometimes to myself. Note your own tendencies here. Then, do the opposite.

#5

Instrument: Sometimes our box of tricks is tied to the instrument we write on. If you usually write on piano, try guitar. If you usually write in a DAW, use pen and paper and whatever instrument. Heck, what about just writing with voice for the first draft?

It’s Summer and Midnight Voice Memos is taking a short break from regularly scheduled programming to recharge this weekend.

I’ll be back to it all again next week!

STAY COOL!
Lucy

Some months ago now, at my favorite open mic we were given a prompt to write a ‘gratitude song’. It was a fun prompt because gratitude songs are kind of cheesy, IMHO. It was challenging to write an honest, truly gratitudinal song. I ended up uncovering some interesting truths about the things for which I’m actually grateful.

(I wrote about this in more specificity in Song Club #45 Hidden Messages).

I think the reason it can hard to write a gratitude song is that gratitude is an easily overlooked emotion. You have to practice finding it—at least I do.

And but also, something funny happens when contemplating feelings of gratitude because we don’t always have it for the things we believe we’re supposed to have it for. It is a confronting space to excavate.

For these reasons, this week I am sharing ‘Entry Points’ related to gratitude.

Thanks for reading,
Lucy

‘Entry Points’

Read more

Oh wow, mending! I can feel the low click-through rate before even sending out this newsletter. BUT hear me out!

First, by mending I don’t mean literally only mending (although, go off if you know how). I mean doing boring stuff that’s easy to put off because it’s unessential to right now, or you can just shove it in a drawer (literal or figurative) to deal with later1.

In an era where we don’t tend to darn our socks, mending might look like…

• Cleaning up your desktop

• Organizing all your music sessions so they have the same file naming convention

• Clearing out and reorganizing your fridge

• Restringing your guitar

• Answering a bunch of emails you should have answered days, months, years ago

You get the picture. It’s about actually attending to the boring stuff.

Second, it’s about attending to the boring stuff because it’s beneficial. It’s helpful to your brain and your creativity to not let boring junk pile up—whether or not you’ll eventually be forced to do it someday.

Most of what I’ve read on why it’s beneficial references the “default mode network” of the brain—a network of areas that are highly active during times of rest, routine activity, or low cognitive demand. The basic gist is that giving yourself a break from direct problem-solving or creative work by doing something routine or easy doesn’t stop your brain from “working on it” in the background. This is where that cliché about our best ideas coming to us in the shower comes from.

Anecdotally, I’d also add two things (though I don’t have proof):

a. Dealing with accumulated mundane tasks that have nothing to do with your creative work clears necessary cognitive space for new ideas to take root—especially if you’re a chronic procrastinator with a long, shameful to-do list hovering around your brain space.

b. Dealing with accumulated mundane tasks related to your creative work is like doing a kind of creative idea stocktake, in the best way. Digging through old notebooks or organizing music files on your laptop brings old creative ideas into new light.

Starting to like the sound of mending? Eh? Eh?

This week, I’m sharing some thoughts on experiments and approaches to doing more mending in your life.

Get to it,
Lucy

Dreaming

Cognitive space clearance sale – everything must go!

What happens to your brain and your creativity when you get every procrastinatory, haunted task out of your mindspace? It might not be totally possible, but I would argue you could get pretty close. Here’s one way to approach it:

1. Write a big, brain-dumpy list of all the little things you’ve been meaning to do but haven’t. You might think of chores, errands, annoying shopping, postcards, emails. Really, just anything you think about doing most weeks but don’t.

2. Set aside a day or afternoon and work through the entire list. Even if you don’t complete an entire task, move it forward somewhat.

3. Notice how it feels (good, bad, otherwise) to be momentarily free of your task ghosts. See what new ideas, sparks, desires arise.

Doing

How to do this idea.

If regular weekly mending doesn’t come easy to you, my hot(ish) take is to skip it. I think aiming for mending at a monthly or semi-monthly clip is totally enough for most music-makers and creatives—and it’ll keep you feeling clear, creative, and free.

It’s not easy to be consistent, even at a lower frequency. Here are some thoughts on how:

• Do it on the same day each month. Pop that reminder in your calendar. Block off the space. Yeah, sometimes you’ll ignore it and blow it off, but this way you’re less likely to forget.

• Pay attention to which mundane tasks you actually find kind of satisfying once you get stuck in—and make sure to always include them.

• In a kind of “eat the frog” style, give yourself an ungenerous amount of time to get through your mending. Let the challenge of completing the tasks at blistering speed become your motivation.

‘You’ve got time and I’ve got money’ by Smerz is a classic slow burn song. At over four and a half minutes long and with a tempo of 66bpm, it simply smolders.

Slow burn songs tend to be kinda sexy—but not always. Kacey Musgraves’ track ‘Slow Burn’ is warm and contemplative. ‘Switching Off’ by Elbow is achingly sad.

In my experience, writing and performing slow burn songs is more difficult than mid or high tempo songs. Finding a propulsive groove or a consistent pulse is harder when you’re playing slowly. Holding your listeners’ interest is harder too.

This should not deter you though. It’s an exploration that will make you a stronger writer and musician all round.

This week, I’m sharing five ‘Entry Points’ for writing slow burn songs.

Burn as slow as you can,
Lucy

‘Entry Points’

Read more

Drugs. Drugs and music. Drugs and music go together like ramma-lamma-lamma-ka-dingity-da-dinga-dong.

Writing and recording music is often accompanied by taking drugs. Same same with listening to or watching music. Some songwriters write about taking drugs, or human experiences that feel like taking drugs. Others make music that gorgeously sits alongside the taking of drugs.

Not to mention, music itself can have a drug-like effect on your brain.

A few of my favorite druggy songs:

• ‘Ecstasy’ - JJ

• ‘365’ - Charlie xcx

• ‘Xanny Bar’ - Porches

• ‘Special K’ - Placebo

It is not the remit of this newsletter to advise on or encourage music-related drug use, but it is an observable and discussed phenomenon. Music and drugs are BFFs. Sometimes, anyway.

This week, I’m sharing some Entry Points from that intersection.

Blaze,
Lucy

‘Entry Points’

Read more

The best thing about a road trip is the opportunity to sit and stare out the window for hours on end—to watch landscapes move, their colors and topography undulating, shifting.

When I do this I become mesmerized and start to unspool. Poetry enters my brain more easily. Poetry comes out of me more easily.

Earlier this month, on a road trip across Massachusetts, I found myself staring a lot. Out the car window, yes, but also, during one particularly notable moment, at a river of dandelions that were snaking their way up a road on warm breeze. I must have watched them for a solid hour.

When I was a teenager I would get home from school and just sit on my couch and stare into space for hours at a time. Back then, I thought I was being unambitious and lazy, but now I see it as necessary to my mental and emotional processing.

On that note, TIL about Shikantaza wall-staring. It’s a specific meditation practice within the Soto school of Zen Buddhism. Shinkantaza literally means ‘just sitting’. It’s a form of objectless meditation. It has very little to do with the wall itself. Rather, it’s about letting the mind rest in awareness.

There’s plenty of literature that expounds the benefits of such staring, whether at nature or a blank wall. Claims include that either or both practices can positively impact focus, attention, memory, creativity, blood pressure, and cortisol levels. I will let you do your own research.

In my personal experience, when I find time to stare a while, I click into a different way of paying attention to the world around me (and processing that attention). Its feels necessary to the making of alive and exciting music, poetry, art.

So this week, I’m sharing some thoughts on sitting and staring.

…,
Lucy

-

Dreaming

An incomplete list of things to stare at.

Murmurations
Dust motes in light
The sky reflected in a body of water
Leaves on trees being tossed in the wind
Fast-moving clouds
Slow-moving clouds
Waves hitting a shoreline
A skyline at sunrise
Shadows on a wall
Ants in the grass
Geese on a pond

Doing

How to sit and stare.

1. Find something (not someone) at which to stare

2. Sit down in as comfortable a spot as you can find

3. Start to notice the movement of the thing(s) you’re staring at

4. Let your eyes go soft

5. Keep paying attention

6. Have whatever thoughts and feelings you have

7. Keep paying attention with soft eyes

“So, how do you deal with not knowing how good a song is?” I remember asking a friend. He was starting to find success as an engineer and producer.

This was his very decisive answer: “Make a finished version. Listen to it a lot. Take some space. Listen again.”

(The same friend also taught me to save a new version of whatever song I was working on each day I worked on it. Date at the beginning of the title, numbered year-month-day.)

So began my habit of prototyping albums in order to understand when they were done.

One of the final prototypes of my latest album, Unfurl. The final version of which is below.

I do this kind of prototyping at the song and album level. My aim when writing these days is to get a finished version of the song recorded in my first writing session. Then, I export it to one of a handful of playlists on the Music app (honestly not the best, but it works fine). I listen to these playlists off and on, usually when commuting or walking around my neighborhood.

What this opens up:

i) Opportunities for casual listening, for the songs to wash over you. What you notice about your own music when bopping around doing errands or heading to work—what sticks out—can be rather instructive.

ii) Opportunities for the song to reveal itself. When I listen this way I find that new parts or lyrics arise, and arise with consistency. As in, the same idea will occur to me over and again, even when I listen weeks apart. I like to trust these gifts or instincts.

iii) Opportunities to understand what songs belong together. This is also information that seems to reveal itself. You don’t have to think too hard, you will just start to know that Song A belongs with Song 7, so on and so forth. An album appears.

This week, I’m sharing Entry Points that offer guidance on this kind of prototyping and listening.

Wishing you new understandings of your work,
Lucy

‘Entry Points’

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Some time ago, I did a School of Song class with David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors). One thing I learned that really stuck with me: how to pay attention to repeating patterns and use variation to write memorable melodies.

Dave’s rule of thumb was a rule of threes, where a pattern repeats twice and then slightly (or greatly) alters the third time.

He used the Dirty Projectors’ song ‘Break-Thru’ to demonstrate this. Have a listen. The song is ripe at every level with lines using that particular rule of threes:

Lately, I’ve been using a slightly different rule of threes, where I cut verses and choruses that feel like they should have a four line structure at the third line. It has the effect of leaving you a bit hungry for the chorus to come back.

This week, some ‘Entry Points’ for exploring repeating patterns.

May they serve you well,
Lucy

‘Entry Points’

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