Bad Dreams

Part Three of the making of my album "The Monster Mash"

[Woodblock print by Katsukawa Shunsho.]

In September of 2024 I was on a telephone call with my therapist when a song came to me.

It arrived the same way a scent of jasmine arrives on a tuft of breeze as you walk down a sidewalk in Los Angeles. It stops you in your tracks. You tell your friend, "Wait a minute, I have to smell this."

A song arrives like that. Sometimes. Rarely.

For some reason, right before this I was staring at the word music and I realized how funny it is that it has that -ic on the end.

"That's like the ending of an adjective," I thought, comparing it to the words romantic, semantic, pedantic, and how all of those mean that something is "of" something else: of romance, of language, of minor details.

"But wait," I thought, "that would mean that music is... of the Muses?"

Yes, of course that's what it means. So obviously what it means that it's hard to see it anymore. And then I got a visceral demonstration of the meaning of music by having a song delivered to my doorstep.

My therapist was walking me through a visualization where I picture someone I am in conflict with—in this case, my soon-to-be-ex-wife—and I take a big red rose and soak up the negative energy between us, then I slingshot that rose into the cosmos and it rains down with golden light.

Maybe it's no coincidence that I was open to receiving a song in this state. It came as directly as if it were played on the radio.

"Bad dreams have been haunting me..."

I had recently discovered my wedding ring at the bottom of my bag. I hadn't meant to keep it, but also it's hard to throw something away that cost so much money and meant so much to you. But really it felt like it was dragging me down that this was still in my belongings.

The hallmark of a received song is that you aren't sure it's yours. Because, well, of course, it isn't. Your brain is an antennae picking up a vibration. Who has sent this vibration? Is it from heaven, from outer space, from the sugar maple tree outside? I don't know. There is rarely the equivalent of a station identification where the broadcaster of the song says who they are.

So, let's say that it comes from the Muses.

I started to worry that this song was going to slip away if the session didn't end soon and I could go downstairs to my guitar to cement what the chords were.

So I did the visualization work and kept jumping back to the song in my mind. Mop up the negative feelings, slingshot them into the cosmos. Remember the song. Back to the cosmos.

Most of us received songs when we were children. We just babbled them out while we played and no one took any particular notice. There is a way that channeling songs is one of the fundamental aspects of being human. Imagine the most terrible person you can think of, and picture them at three years old, playing in the sand, singing a song. Was that just an aberrant episode for them? Or were they closer to their true self, before they were taught that singing songs was disruptive?

I finished my therapy session and went downstairs. I was staying at my old friend Chris' house in Ithaca, New York. He was there on the couch, his hand touching his reading glasses as he peered through them at his laptop.

"Hello," he said in his sweet voice as he looked up at me. "How are you?"

I probably looked like a crazy inventor with my hair poking out as I said, "I wrote a song during my therapy session. Or, really I received a song... and I just want to see what the chords are."

"Oh!" he said and he sat up a little and put down his work.

I got my guitar out of the case at the foot of the couch and started strumming it.

"I think it's in F," I said.

I strummed a little bit and cleared my throat.

bad dreams have been haunting me

weighing me down and taunting me

it starts to feel like there's nowhere left to sleep

here's a picture of a modern man

breaking down whenever he can

he wants to change but he feels he's in too deep

I strummed a little more as I looked up to the heavens, or maybe just to the second floor where I was when I received the song, but there were no more lyrics.

I put the guitar back in the case and started clicking the latches closed.

"Is that it?" Chris asked, surprised.

"Well, yeah, that's all that came to me."

"No, I meant, you're not going to work on it more?"

I thought about this for a second, as I considered my guitar, released from its little bedchamber for ninety seconds to test out a new song and then abruptly put back.

"Well," I said, trying to understand what I was doing. "I'm trying to see what happens when I leave more room for the song to be received. So I'm going to try leaving it on the back burner."

"Do you worry that it might never get finished that way?"

"Yes," I said, scratching my chin. "We'll see."

I walked back upstairs, opened my laptop, and Googled "etymology of the word music" and indeed it said, "from the Greek mousikē meaning 'of the Muses.'"

I thought how Chris and I both used to live in New Orleans, where there is literally a street called Music. The names of streets there are written on white tiles in pale blue capital letters and set into the sidewalk. These tiles have become cracked over time and some of the letters have gone missing, and because it's New Orleans, they don't have a robust system of maintaining them, but in this case this feels like a perfect embodied metaphor of the type of beating the arts have taken under capitalism.

The names of the nine Greek Muses are also street names in New Orleans:

Calliope, Muse of epic poetry

Clio, Muse of lyre-playing

Polyhymnia, Muse of hymns

Terpsichore, Muse of dance

Erato, Muse of literature and science

Melpomene, Muse of tragedy

Thalia, Muse of comedy

Urania, Muse of the stars

and Euterpe, Muse of music itself

People actually live on those New Orleans streets with those unwieldy Greek names. They have to type in Terpsichore when they're singing up for cable, or they have to spell Melpomene over the phone to a receptionist. I wonder how many of them ever think where those names came from.

Writers of antiquity would start their works by invoking the Muses, calling to them to bring the inspiration to their hands. Now we live in an age of separation and individualism, where you're supposed to copyright a song as a work that came from your own brilliance. If you offer any concession to the fact that the song came from somewhere else, it will mean a dent in your royalty check.

I don't know, but if I were one of the Muses, I'd find that pretty insulting.

In David Byrne's book How Music Works, he writes the following:

"It seems that creativity, whether birdsong, painting, or songwriting, is as adaptive as anything else. Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context. When something works, it strikes us as not just being a clever adaptation, but as emotionally resonant as well. When the right thing is in the right place, we are moved."

I think of a bird copyrighting a song. Or even a group of robins convening to discuss changes to the robin song, having arguments about it, one of the robins going solo with his own material.

From Ithaca I went to New York City and had an apartment to myself for ten days. I allowed myself the opportunity, finally, to completely fall apart. I had been clutching my insides for a year, and now, amongst a city full of life and constant movement, I collapsed into a bed and slept hours and hours, then woke up and felt every bad feeling I had been avoiding, then fell asleep again.

The Mets were in the playoffs. I watched on my laptop in the kitchen while I continued working on "Bad Dreams." I can't honestly say that the whole thing was received. The bridge, in particular, took some effort. But in general, the words arrived rather gently. It was an early entry on the spreadsheet of songs for the album The Monster Mash.

With the unlocking of that song, I decided to let go of the narratives that were torturing me. This was no easy decision. These narratives had saved my life. But they were a weight pulling me to the bottom of the river.

The last day I was in Brooklyn was a beautiful fall day. People were sitting outside laughing. Someone was strumming a guitar. I walked in a direct line towards the East River with my wedding ring cupped in my hands. I whispered these words over and over "I love you, I'm sorry, forgive me, thank you..."

When I got to the water, there was no hesitation. I threw the ring up in the air and it traveled in a big arc. It hung there a second longer than I would have expected before I heard the plop into the water. Like it was soaking it all in before it went under.

Here is the demo I made for the song "Bad Dreams" on that first day in Ithaca.

The Monster Mash on Bandcamp