Daron's Guitar Chronicles Vol. 13 (contd)

1100 Dear God

Dear God

There was a moment of panic on my part when I realized the guitar I had there in Tennesee was the Miller, the low-action acoustic guitar Bart had given me years ago, and not the Ovation. Not that there was anything wrong with the Miller. The main problem was the case didn't have the same compartments in it, and in particular it didn't have the book of staff paper nor my usual song notebook in it...

That came close to derailing me, right there.

But Ziggy had a notebook we could use, and he pointed out that it wasn't like I was going to write out a symphony on the spot. Tab and jottings of melody were going to have to be good enough. We didn't have any way to record anything right then. I had a vague notion that me or Court could go find a Radio Shack tomorrow and at least pick up a cassette recorder. Heck, maybe Remo had one in his luggage...

I couldn't let worrying about that stop us. Ziggy kept me on track, too, making me articulate the song concept and then tossing melody and word combinations back and forth with me until it started to gel. With both of us singing, I quickly found a harmony to slide into his melody as the chorus came into being.

I threw away a lot of verses and lines for verses, because the song kept trying to turn into a criticism of the Church. Which is weird, since the song was supposed to be about my mom dying, but the imagery coming from Candlelight and carrying through kept making me wish there actually was a Church that was as good and holy and perfect as the one I tried to believe in as a child. A place where love and forgiveness were actually practiced, instead of just being another pillar of oppressive power, perpetuating itself with beliefs like, for example, "queers deserve to die."

If I squinted in just the right light I could see how my brain used to hold thoughts like that off to one side, but keeping them out of the main part of my mind took energy, it took work, and maybe some of my self-preservation instinct was damaged by having to do that all the time. The thing that made it easier to wall it off now was the energy that came from that day in Manhattan when we'd gone to the Pride march. Hundreds of thousands of people falling silent and then filling that silence with a living, breathing roar of affirmation... I was still carrying around the strength it gave me, beating right inside my ribcage.

That was the living spirit of love and nonviolence I thought we should build churches to.

But that wasn't what this song was about. Focus, Daron.

Time stops when you get into a zone like we did. You go into a kind of bubble, where the only thing you can see is the next bit that needs to be worked on, and the next, and the next, and you don't have a sense of being hungry or tired or anything. We did remember to hydrate because singing makes your throat dry, but I didn't have any sense at all of how much time was passing.

It felt good. "Is four verses enough?" I asked Ziggy at one point. We were sitting on the squared-off couch, and my fingertips were on fire but I didn't care. Everything else felt so good I could ignore the pain in my fingers. Thank goodness I'd done what little building up of calluses that I had, or it might have been physically impossible to hang in there like I did.

"Four verses is plenty," Ziggy said, "but this is only three."

"I know, but I think it'll take one more to round off the idea." I jotted with a pencil on the notebook in front of me on the coffee table.

"What it really needs to elevate it, though, is a bridge." Ziggy yawned suddenly. "By which I mean a vocal bridge and not just an instrumental one."

"Yeah." I could feel it, like a shape was forming in my mind–in my chest, really–that I needed to sketch for him, not on paper with the pencil, but in the air with musical notes. We'd settled on A minor as the key for the song, and I felt like the bridge needed all the suspended notes the chords could carry. Which sounds odd, I know, but if a bridge is going to do its job, its there to open up the song, to expand the palette and give it another dimension.