Beam , shmeam - who needs it? I write my own songs now! You who do not know me will not find this in any way miraculous - but believe me, it is a miracle. It is a miracle for the following reasons:

1) Up until a few months ago, I couldn’t play a single chord on the guitar.

2) Up until a few months ago, I had absolutely no desire to play the guitar, because it has never been a particularly fascinating instrument to me.

3) I have gone through life with the utterly firm conviction that I could not carry a tune to save my life.

4) I have always assumed that the mysteries of songwriting were something that would never be revealed to me.

5) I have always assumed that I would never again personally know someone who wrote songs that I thought were really good.

And all those things have been changed or proven wrong.

I have my mother to thank for my sudden interest in the guitar. My mom plays the guitar, and her guitar playing is one of my most vivid memories from childhood. We would sit on her bed, and she would sing and play songs for hours while I listened intently. I loved the rollicking religious ones about sin and redemption, like “Wade in the Water”. My absolute favorite, though, was “Richard Cory” by Simon and Garfunkel. I didn’t understand it, but the part about Richard Cory putting a bullet in his head had some sort of strange attraction for me (I was a little goth in the making). So my mom was the guitar player, and was the one who messed around on every instrument but the guitar.

Until this past March, that is, when I was visiting home, and I convinced my mom to buy a gorgeous twelve-string Washburn that she was dying to have. She bought it, and I fell in love with it. I messed around on it a bit, figured out how to play a couple of chords (E minor! E minor!), and somehow, in the course of an afternoon, a song started to come to me, and I started to sing it. And a budding singer-songwriter was born.

I sat around for hours every day playing the guitar. When I came back to Freiburg, I sat around for hours every day playing the guitar we have here, and as I learned more chords (A minor! A minor!), more songs started coming to me, and I realized that, when I sing well, I kind of sort of maybe just a little bit sound like P.J. Harvey. I can carry a tune. I can even make up my own tunes, and I like what I come up with.

I can’t express all that this does for my mental state - not only because I am so happy to have revived the creativity that has stagnated within me over the past few years, and not only because I have discovered how cathartic it is to wail out a song while railing away on the guitar, but also because it has forced me to realize that Beam is not the end-all be-all of music as know it. I still love the Beam songs, and I would give anything to have had everything work out differently for Beam. I am still absolutely convinced that Chris is the most incredible songwriter I will ever know. But when I pick up the guitar and play my own songs, I realize that it’s easy to become so fixated on something outside of you (in my case, Beam) that you don’t always explore everything that you have inside of you. I underestimated myself, I suppose. I convinced myself that I couldn’t do something - that’s not something I do very often, and I’m glad that I could prove myself wrong.

One problem that I have encountered is that I don’t think I am able to come up with a song that does not have E minor in it somewhere - or if not E minor, than at least A minor or some variation thereof. That could lead to a certain samey-ness, but I’m not too concernced about it. I come up with these songs for myself, not for an audience per se, and seeing as I think E minor is the chord to end all chords, I will continue to strum away at my depressing E minor songs.

I don’t know where the songs come from or what they are about. I play around with chords (I still don’t know very many, so it tends to be variations of the same chords all the time - I’m still learning), and then words and bits of phrases will start to “come to me.” Some of the words will come out of nowhere, the lines bubbling up out of my subconscious complete and well-formed. I find that the same kinds of words and themes come to my mind unbidden: betrayal, sin, guilt, deception, loss - archetypal subjects, I suppose, but still, it makes me worry about that subconsious of mine. The words that don’t just come out of nowhere are the ones that I really have to work on. I play the chords and sing nonsense until some words are there, and then I consciously hammer out the rest - that’s the hard part.

I try hard to not be obvious and trite. I have never liked female singers in general (there are very, very, very few exceptions), so I feel I have my work cut out for me if I want to be a female singer whose songs I would like if I hadn’t written them myself - if you know what I mean. I have my own mental scale of female singer-songwriters (I hate that phrase as well - it conjures up horrible images of elfin women with ethereal voices and flowery dresses bemoaning the fact that their little hearts have been broken by some big mean boy - it makes me feel quite violent).

On one end of my mental scale is P.J. Harvey, the coolest of them all, the woman I want to be. On the other end of the scale is a collection of people lead by Jewel. Somewhere very close to the P.J. Harvey end is Sinead O’Connor (the Sinead O’Connor I know from “The Lion and the Cobra”), and somewhere towards the Jewel end is Tori Amos (partly because I don’t like her music and partly because I can’t stand her rabid fans - they’re right up there with Cat People for me, but that is another subject for another time).

Somewhere in the midst of all this lie the songs that I attempt to write. I’ll leave it to others to judge which end of the scale I belong on.

Further reading…