I M Perfect lady

I went to my first night of the Writers on Location series held in the little white church on Finlandia’s campus.

The topic this week was singer/songwriters. Eric Koskinen and Mike LaBeau entertained us and shared their experience about putting words and music together.

How music is used to back up a word, how it can change the meaning of the word by how the music flows behind it, swirls around it and carries it away.

They spoke of the Business of song writing, how you write for a hit record, for a catchy tune, to be the one that makes the money, and how sunshiny bright tunes sell better than the dark renderings of pain and sorrow.

Seeing how there is a market for ‘lightness’ and how the more poignant journeys of the soul are of lesser value in the market place seemed sad to me.

I came away knowing it would not be fun to write for an audience or for a buck, to have to force words of a certain flavor forward.

They did sing their songs and you could hear their hearts and souls wind around the words and music, perhaps not a best seller, but songs with feelings and longings, words sharing with us who they are.

Most singers today do not write their own songs, they are actually acting out what someone else has wrote; someone in a room with a few other folks, playing on instruments and tossing around words to frame up a song. The singer than gets the song and uses their voice, but the words are not from their soul, but a collaboration, bits and pieces strung together to make a story to be sung.

Listening to all the different writers, authors, storytellers, songwriters, singers I see that we all use whatever avenue we are comfortable with to share our journeys. That we each have an outlet for expression, an Art form that we happen upon that is our vessel to express what is in our souls.

Words are words and how we arrange them in ways that leave a trail for others to follow what we feel is the magic to writing.

Perhaps it is getting in touch with feelings, digging down deep into the caverns of our soul’s journey, and then using the words to deliver their message by laying them out in a poem or a song, in a book or a blog that connects us together.

It is the longing to be heard, to be understood, to know that we are not alone, that we are not the only ones who have suffered, known sorrow, lived through confusion and angst, to be carried away by overwhelming pain or bursting with joy or engulfed in love that leaves you breathless.

Connecting souls on this journey called life, using words.