Song of the Week 11/26/10

Tired Pony - "Dead American Writers"



There are certain years where I sit down to write this list and it just pours out of me. I’ve found myself up at 1:00 a.m., pouring another glass of Diet Coke just because I know I’ve struck a rich vein of creativity and I don’t want to lose it by going to sleep. Other years, errrrr, not so much. This year, for example. It’s been like, well, I can’t even come up with a good cliché to describe how hard it’s been to extract the words from my brain and get them to come out my fingers into this here ancient keyboard. When you’re checking your Twitter feed once every six minutes or so because you’ve written only a sentence in a half hour and you’re desperate for anything to take your brain away from writing…well, it’s not good. In the midst of my mind needing some Metamucil, I started looking over the lyrics to Tired Pony’s “Dead American Writers.” And I’ll be damned if Gary Lightbody didn’t nail the pains of writers block in a song, um, about dead writers. Check out the first and second verses:

“Here's to every time that you rock a boat
Here's to every word that you ever wrote
There were clues but it was never clear
You've got to choose your own way out of here

I've been waiting for the spark myself,
I've been scrambling in the dark for health
I have read your words a thousand times
All this spark but smashed up love and crime.”

Waiting for the spark myself. Fucking a, Gary, I feel your pain.