I used to write songs all the time. In fact, songwriting was the first literary genre I took seriously as writing for writing’s sake (as opposed to strings of words on paper that I would turn in for a grade at school like a monkey doing a trick for a banana with a big “A+” drawn on the peel. Or a banana with a “B-” on it–those bananas worked fine for me, too).

Back when I was a skinny, shaggy young slacker, I wrote songs for the first band I was in, The Missionaries. Then I wrote a lot more songs for the bands that followed (Leatherbound Shakespeares, The Ben Was, Hop on Pop). None of those songs were any good–seriously, the best thing about those bands (besides how amazing our hair was back then) were the band names. But the songs themselves? In retrospect, I can see that they were very early artistic efforts, much more earnest than skillful.

Come to think of it, though, I do believe a couple of songs I wrote for that last youthful band, Hop on Pop, were actually pretty good. I remember feeling proud of them when I was 20 years old because they were so far beyond anything I had written previously. In fact, I’d give a lot to hear those songs again, not the way I would play them today, but as we played them over thirty years ago, feeling brash and flip and like we were going to be whisked off at any minute to an as-yet-undetermined big city to become rock stars.

I’ve been playing music on and off (mostly off) since then, mostly for a band where I am the youngest and least technically adept player. This band has gone by a few names as well: Los Profes, then the Gravitropes, and now we’re trying on the name threejays (what do you think, dear reader? Should it be capitalized? All lower case? ALL UPPER CASE?!) In any case, the one thing I brought to the group historically–besides relative youth–is half-decent songwriting ability.

So it was with a little leap of inner joy when I found myself writing a song a couple of weeks ago–the first one I have written in at least 12 years or so. Will it be any good? Hard to say. As I tell my creative writing students all the time, you’ll write a lot of crappy poems (or stories, or songs) before you write a single good one. And then you’ll write a lot more crap before you start writing good stuff with any regularity. And no one I know writes good stuff all the time. So the odds are stacked against this song (with the working title “Necktie Rhetoric”) being a good one. But it feels great to come back to a genre I haven’t tried in a long time. Whoever you are out there, and whatever you do, I wish for you to feel the freedom to make something useless exactly the way you want to make it.