The Heart Grows Fonder

A while back I wrote a song about a past marriage – and I also wrote a companion blog post about it. It was a challenging relationship – I always thought I had done something wrong, that there was always another shoe to drop that would reveal some failure or shortcoming. Invariably whatever I had done was seen as a direct affront to my wife.

I didn’t realize to what extent the many years of this had affected me. After some time had passed in my relationship with my now wife of twenty years, it began to dawn on me that it wasn’t happening any more, no other shoe was dropping, whatever I was doing or had done was “okay”, the cloud had lifted, I was no longer in constant fear of being called on the carpet. It was good.

Back when I was working at Bell Labs I became friends with Joan Bachenko, a computational linguist who was also an avid equestrian. One day I visited Joan and a horse trainer she worked with when the trainer (whose name I can’t remember) was having a session with a young, largely untrained horse. What I witnessed was undoubtedly very common, but it made a big impression on me.

The trainer and the horse were in a relatively small, circular pen, and the trainer had a kind of horse training whip – a long shaft with a long “lash” at the end. The trainer would use the whip to get the horse to trot around the edge of the pen, first one direction, then the other direction, then back again. After some time, the trainer stopped directing the horse, and immediately a remarkable thing happened: The horse turned toward the trainer and walked toward him, in essence asking “What do you want me to do now?” The horse had quickly accepted the trainer as in charge and had relinquished his autonomy to the trainer.

Years later I saw the dynamic with my former wife as similar to this horse training one. And once the “whip” had been removed in my new relationship, first I felt disoriented and sensed a vacuum of “direction”. Then the fresh breath of freedom took over ;-). Every time I noticed this change, it was as if I’d been given a little gift from my new partner. I wonder if the horse ever felt this.

Now for the “bait and switch” part of this post: I had wanted to write a song about this little gift. But after multiple failed attempts at a lyric that worked (lyrics are hard for me), I settled on a kind of companion but admittedly more typical theme: a celebration and appreciation of differences, and a challenge to the old cliché that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. Although it can take a certain kind of maturity and wisdom, I think we should be appreciating each other’s idiosyncrasies and “faults”. And in my world, nobody’s in charge, each of us is a full partner, and intimacy and the familiarity that comes with it make the heart grow fonder. And that little gift that I keep getting every day is a reminder that maybe I’m ok just being myself.

I note that some of my songs border on what I might call “sappy”. (Maybe a better word is “twee”. I’ve always liked that word; apparently its origin is that it’s the way a young child might mispronounce “sweet”. Aww….) Well, I know that I need to rock more, but I’m in love with melody, and I can’t help myself. So, I’m sorry (click the image to listen):

An accomplished musician friend mentioned recently that my recordings are rather “produced”, meaning that they have lots of instruments and parts and stuff – harmonies, horns, extra guitars, sometimes a mandolin or keyboards or synthesizer, etc etc. He probably didn’t mean anything by the comment, but I immediately wondered if they are too produced. I told him that I have a rule that the song needs to “work” with just acoustic guitar before I ever start arranging it, i.e. adding drums, bass, all that extra stuff.

I enjoy the arranging process so much that I am probably in constant danger of over-stuffing the songs. It’s interesting that when you over-produce a song you can sap it of its strength and power and distinctiveness. (I found myself considering saying that excessive production can “emasculate” a song, then I wondered why a word that means removing “maleness” is our go-to term for making something or someone weaker and less effective. What would “effeminate” mean, if it were a verb? I certainly don’t think our daughters need to be more “manly” to be strong. WTF?)

Anyway, I do fear that I have also over-produced this new song. I will work to do better. In the meantime, all y’all please hang in there, okay? And thanks for listening.