My 2018 - This is my Hobby: Guitar and Songwriting

I'm something of a professional hobbyist: all of the things that I do for money, or that I'm working on doing for money, are things other people do as hobbies. Some years back I even invented a hobby, one that I don't do anymore, but I have friends that do. (I was the first person to run a professional-level online science fiction magazine as a hobbyist, something that several people are doing at any given time now.)

As such, it's kind of difficult for me to hold onto a hobby. I started playing online poker in basically the same way I'm messing around on Steemit now, and that turned into a high level of skill and a few hundred thousand dollars. (I can hope Steemit goes as well.) I started photography as something to distract me from a difficult emotional time, and that turned into a large body of work, three books so far, and a weird art career. I started screen printing in hopes of a different perspective working me out of a rut in my photography, and it not only did that, it generated a large-scale serious fine art project that I'm really excited about. I've been taking some pictures so I can post about it.

In some ways this is great. I know there's no shortage of people out there stuck in office, warehouse, or retail jobs, wishing they could do any of these things for a living. And it is in fact pretty great controlling my own schedule and spending most of my time making stuff. But it does have one flaw: when everything I do to relax grows into something I take seriously, relaxation and de-stressing consistently takes a back seat. Which is turns out is pretty bad for me, and threatens to collapse the structure that depends entirely on my ability to motivate myself. Stress is a real killer when you're your own manager. (And I was not naturally a good manager. I have slowly picked up some skills.)

Through this, one thing started a hobby and has stayed consistently a hobby: playing the guitar and songwriting. Possibly this is because the life of a professional or semi-professional musician has very little appeal to me. So I play for myself, or I play at informal gatherings, and I don't worry too much about whether I'm doing it at a high level. I still try to improve, because that's the only way to be, but I don't worry about it too much. I'm not dedicated to it, and more importantly I don't worry about not being dedicated to it. It's OK that it is what it is. It's OK if I go years without performing for anyone or producing anything recorded. It's OK if sometimes I go months without practicing, as I have recently. It's always there for me again when I need it, and that's comforting. And that's all I need it to be.

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This gives it a very full, deep sound that's not really like anything else. Don't worry, you'll get to hear it later in the article. But before that I'm going to go back and tell my story from the beginning.

In 2006, my partners gave me a guitar for my 27th birthday, a Seagull dreadnaught, which turned out to be a good beginner's guitar. I didn't find that out at the time, though, because I immediately went into the hospital in a full-blown House-style nobody-knows-what's-wrong-with-me incident. Somewhat miraculously I came out of it alive and able to walk, but I spent the next year and more on barely anything other than that, and the guitar sat in its case in my bedroom.

If you've faced death before, or if you've dealt with people who have, you know that they sometimes react to it by drastically overdoing afterward. That was me in spades and probably another couple suits. The result was that in the fall and winter of 2017 I had a complete emotional breakdown. That's not a good thing when you're a professional poker player; you start making terrible decisions, and they cost you money. I lost a sizeable chunk of my bankroll and eventually figured out I needed to quit, not knowing if I'd ever be able to come back. Suddenly I had a lot of time and no income, but I did have a camera and a guitar, both of which I'd been meaning to learn how to use.

Those two things pretty much got me through the next year. In the middle of 2007 I had been to my first Josh Ritter show, and picked up a songbook, with everything up through the then-new Historical Conquests. And I learned to play everything. Josh is great, and I still go see him every time I have the chance, but I was definitely obsessed. I still have the shreds of that songbook around here somewhere.

Some songs were particularly refuges for me, which led to a level of repetition in my guitar practice that I probably could never have matched otherwise. Lawrence, Kansas, Rainslicker, Good Man, Next to the Last True Romantic out of the Josh book. (Links to Josh's versions. I now wish I had made more recordings of mine.) And one particularly from another artist, Jeffrey Foucault's "Northbound 35," particularly as interpreted by Richard Shindell. That one's about Minnesota, my home state, and it particularly resonated with where I was at the time. (It's also an amazing song.)

I did record one song from that era, and the Josh book: "Roll On." This is the first song I ever recorded, and both the recording quality and the performance are pretty bad. Soundcloud doesn't like covers, so maybe they'll have mercy on me and take it down before you read this.

Late in 2008 I wrote my first song, a bit of political satire called "Voting for the Lizard People." We had a very hotly-contested US Senate race that came down to a few hundred votes. During the recount a ballot cropped up where the voter had written in "Lizard People" in nearly every race. The Republican candidate tried to claim the vote, and it became quite a news story. So I wrote a song about it, sort of. I wouldn't say this is good but it's much more listenable than the last one. And hey, politically, it has definitely held up.

Most of the songs I've written have been humorous, either parodies or satire. While I'm very attached to Josh Ritter, in songwriting my hero is Tom Paxton. I spent a long time after this mainly playing other people's songs, though, and learning chords. One of the great thing about Josh's songs is that they have a good range of difficulty for someone who's learning what he's doing. Some of the songs, like "Lawrence, Kansas," are simple 1-4-5s and playable pretty much from Day 1. Others are more complicated. (I still have no idea what that chord actually is in "Kathleen," but I can play it in my sleep. The book calls it Bmin11 which I'm pretty sure it isn't.)

It's about that time that I started tuning the guitar down, and down again. I started with Josh's song The Temptation of Adam, which has some of the best lyrics of any song I know, and is written in C# standard, which is three steps down. I liked that and started transposing other songs into it. I bought extra-thick strings to make it work. It's around this time I started playing in music parties at science fiction conventions, and my tuning was driving everybody nuts. I wasn't about to go back to standard, but I decided to go all the way to a legitimate baritone, and started doing research, which is when I discovered the existence of this Taylor and immediately knew I had to have one. I haunted eBay for a year looking for good prices, and finally bought one in early 2014.

I only have two recordings with the Taylor right now. I've found the Steemit Open Mic community and I'm hoping that will help me find motivation to record a little more. One of the things I'm really loving about Steemit is the challenges that match up well with things I'd like to be doing anyway.

I still rather like that last one. It's not a song I normally do, I just did that video because my mom wanted me to.

I think that's the basic story, and this post is so long it's lagging the composer something fierce, so I'm just going to drop a few more rough-cut recordings of original songs and parodies here. I look forward to sharing more of my music with you here in the future.

A parody of "Acadian Driftwood" about the Entwives from The Lord of the Rings:

"At the Cryptozoo," a humorous song about cryptids:

"Cure It All With Gas," a history of STEM song about the Pneumatic Institution: (Wow, the lyrics for that have changed a lot since this recording.)

And lastly, probably my most popular song so far, a parody of Paxton's "Changing My Name To Chrysler" about Ghostbusters:

This post was made as part of the My 2018: This is my Hobby contest by @anomadsoul.