When last we left this blog, I was contemplating whether to participate in a) the re-launch of Connor Garvey’s Cover Your Friends blog, and b) the Fearless Songwriter challenge in which you write a song a day for a week. I thought if I were going to do one, the more likely one was CYF – I had already started learning the song I wanted to play, and it’s a much lower input activity, just requiring learning and making a video of a song. As Sunday wore on, I was actually leaning towards doing neither. The song prompt for the first day of the Fearless Songwriter challenge, Way Up North, was not inspiring me. I’d spent the entire day wrestling with page proofs (a mind-numbing activity) and foresaw all the work ahead of me for the week. And I was hesitating on doing the CYF friends video – in the first place, I hadn’t gotten the okay yet from Alicia to play her song, and could imagine a world in which she would say no (the song I chose is an old and obscure one of hers, and maybe she wouldn’t want it covered?). And I was feeling like I wasn’t really in the “in crowd” of musicians contributing to Connor’s project, so no one would miss me if I didn’t participate this round. So I decided to go for a run. And while running I was pondering the extent to which I participate in a number of different music communities but am not really central to any of them. That’s not entirely surprising – I’m an introvert and intentionally keep myself on the outskirts of a lot of social activities, and there’s a way in which I make choices that intentionally keep me connected to, but not centrally involved in, these communities. (There’s another blog post in that, eventually.) And that set of thoughts started a song running through my head, building off the song prompt. It had a first verse about way up north, a second one about way down south, a third about way out west and a fourth (you guessed it) about way out (back?) east, with a chorus about not really fitting in anywhere. When I got home from the run, I went down to the music room to try to write that song. I started with the line “my forbears came from way up north.” But after I wrote some melody for that line and started to move onto the next, an unexpected refrain (that ended up being “ride a painted pony; push a crooked plow”) presented itself. Which didn’t fit with the idea of the song I’d originally been writing in my head on the run. But I decided to follow it where it seemed to be going . . . and since at least some of my forbears were in Minnesota (and came from north of there) I decided to try setting the song there. Did a little searching about this history of the white settlement of Minnesota (since I know little of my own family’s actual history) and started writing it about the farming communities in the area that came just after the civil war with new statehood and the Homestead Act. I still didn’t know where the song was going (and the repeating 2nd line had gotten matched to a repeating 4th line “Oh if they could only see me now”). But as I was going through the story I wrote the line “through dust and debt we persevered,” which got me thinking about the current drought in the Midwest and the fact that the point of telling this story might be that this way of life was ending . . . so I concluded the song by having the current economic and weather situation drive the person off the family land. It’s still drafty, and I don’t know whether it will be a keeper (judge for yourself – I think this link will work – here.). But what I love about this song was that it illustrated perfectly what l love about the songwriting process – not knowing where a song comes from of where it will go. I loved Peter Mulvey’s idea of only being able to see as far ahead as your headlights, writing until you’re there, and then that lets you see the next small segment.