Blog: Memory Unlocked*

Hi hi! How is everyone today? Good? I hope the answer is good, if not, no worries, we will not be dealing in heavy content matter in this installment of my blog! That’s on purpose. I can’t do the hourly, world ending news today & the emotions that swirl up in the wake of their disturbance. Instead we’re going to be diving into the past, but like the shimmery, melancholic past, we are not here today to trauma bond.

A while back I invested in a book & its accompanying journal. The book in question is The Book Of Alchemy: A Creative Practice For An Inspired Life by Suleika Jaquad. The book is a series of journaling prompts collected & curated by Jaquad. Some are stories & anecdotes from friends of hers, some are strangers, but she has sewn them all together into an intriguing structure & bound many of them together with theming. The way that the prompts play out follows the structure of the respective author laying out their version of their entry to you, then you are met with the prompt following your read through so that you have an understanding of what something within that prompt might look like. I have been in the section of the book the focuses on prompts based in memory of late.

The crazy thing that I’m finding where this section of memory is concerned is just how much I actually remember, how much is buried just under the surface that goes unnoticed in my day to day recall, that just requires the slightest brushing off to expose the artifact underneath. Take for example the first prompt in the section, creating a memory web.

The example talks about passing the time while swimming laps, which as a former swimmer, I understand the monotony of. The author presents a second hand account of a method someone they once conversed with relayed to them where you pick a random year then create a memory web off of that. What events happened in that year, the broad strokes, then what details of that memory spur other memories or tangents to rise to the surface? I’ll give you an example using the year & web that I came up with.

The year that I picked was 2014. In that year I graduated college, I went on tour with Janelle Arthur, I released my EP Photographs, I went to LA for Spring Break with some friends, I was deep in the world of NAACA, playing showcases in the hope to get booked at colleges for events, those were the main broad strokes that I came up with from there. Let’s see where some of these led!

NAACA was honestly probably the most prevalent thread for me because I was traveling a lot for it. It brought up standing in a booth at a convention center in Myrtle Beach with Brian Waymire, my booking agent at the time. I remember standing there & Brett Young being represented in a booth across the way from me. At the time Brett hadn’t become a full fledged country star, but I had an old song of his, “In Love Alone,” saved to my music library at the time. Another memory. I’d stayed in a certain hotel that allowed dogs because I had brought Harvey with me. He & I frequently slipped away to the beach that weekend. He was afraid of the waves. Just writing about this actually just unlocked another part of that memory. The original hotel we’d book, that was listed as a “pet hotel” ended up canceling me because they hadn’t disclosed to me that they only allowed dogs under 40 lbs. That doesn’t work when you have a golden retriever. We ended up having to scramble to find a hotel last minute because they hadn’t informed us of this until we arrived to check in.

Off the NAACA tangent I also have Portland, Oregon. The band had been selected to play a showcase at NAACA West so James Black, Everett Bowles, Eric Coveney, Kyle May, & I made the flight up & played. We got picked up by an old family friend, Al Brandt, who was kind enough to lend us his truck for the weekend. Since we had a couple of days before our showcase & Brian didn’t have a booth at the convention hall, we went out to the Oregon coast for two days & a night. Along the way we listened to Eli Young Band, which the guys said they could definitely hear having influenced my songs at the time, & we made our way through The Beatles Love album that was released from their Cirque Du Soleil show in Vegas. It was concluded that the album is a great way to introduce non-Beatles fans to The Beatles. We stopped in Seaside at an internet cafe so Everett could do some schoolwork, took photos at Cannon Beach, went down to Tillamook & toured the cheese factory, then stayed the night in Newport, then made our way back to Portland the next day. It was there we discovered PB&Js Grilled (RIP) & Stumptown Coffee before it became a full blown nationwide thing.

It’s a very interesting practice & one that certainly surprised me with how deep my mind was willing to go & the wide amount of memory mining that was available along each vein of thought.

The next entry was about food & how certain foods can be favorites of ours because of the time & place attached to them. I think a great example of this use in our current culture is the online show “Last Meal,” where celebrities submit their ‘last meal’ & it’s collected or recreated from around the world & coursed out along with an interview. This then got Evan & I going through the practice of the things we think would be on each other’s last meals. Our lists were way too long for the show, & would definitely require some thinning out, but I realized many of the items involved were there because of the memories tied to them or the places & slots in time in which they exist. I’ll lay out a few of mine below just for fun, again, my list was way too long to appear on the show in its current form.

Charlie’s ‘Last Meal’ List (In No Particular Order):

• Slumgullien from The Chowder Bowl in Newport, Oregon

• El Volcan & Tamales from Three Borders Brunch & Grill in Los Angeles, California

• The Welcome Cocktail from Corvino Supper Club in Kansas City, Missouri (RIP)

• A Giant Pistachio Macaron from Lemonade in Los Angeles, California

• Onigiri Flight from Kisser in Nashville, Tennessee

• Green Chile Stew & Sopapillas from Frontier in Albuquerque, New Mexico

• The Oregonian (with Duck) from PB&Js Grilled in Portland, Oregon (RIP)

• Crown Rib with Cheesy Corn & Beans from Jack’s Stack in Kansas City, Missouri

• Mulled Mead from Honeytree Meadery in Nashville, Tennessee

• White Bean Tuna Salad on Rye from Dean & Deluca in New York City

• A Golden Glow Mango from Yee’s Mangos in Kihei, Hawaii

• Chef Brian Baxter’s Cheeseburger with Tots & a Coming Up Milhouse from The Patterson House in Nashville, TN (pre-move)

• Hazelnut Affogato from The Grumpy Baker in Sydney, Australia

• The Blaze (Kai Dama) from Silverlake Ramen only from the OG in Silverlake, California

• Four Eggs Scrambled with American Cheese from a Diner

• Cake Lady Cake

• Sourdough Cecamariti from Rolf & Daughters in Nashville, Tennessee

• Guava & Cream Cheese Pastelitos from Black Bean Deli in Winter Park, Florida

• A Mexican Coke with Filipino Rum & Calmansi Juice

• My Mom’s Chicken Noodle Soup

• Shrimp Jalfrezi & Hummus from Cafe Rakka in Hendersonville, Tennessee

• Turkey Club from Jersey Boys in Overland Park, Kansas (RIP)

• Albacore Handroll from Sugarfish in Los Angeles, CA

• Smoked Salmon Sandwich from Marrbury Smokehouse in Carsluith, Scotland

• Veggie Burger with Steak Fries & Wasabi Mayo from PM in Nashville, TN (RIP)

• Ooh La La from Henry’s in Acworth, Georgia

Just To Name A Few…

My final prompt from the last few days dealt with teachers. You were meant to choose a teacher & humanize them, write about them as a student of life themselves. What was their childhood like, their adolescence, their young adulthood? What do they like, what to they dislike, what struggles have they been through? Any & all specific details you can recall about their life, write it down. It is an interesting practice, not just for the memory aspect, but because it helps you to humanize people. Sub out someone else. Make it about your boss, your parents, your grandparents, that coworker you talk to frequently but wouldn’t say you’re close with. See how many strands of memory you can pull on that help further the recall, then step back & look at the person that you’ve illustrated with your knowings of their lives.

All of these prompts have been a really fascinating dive into memory for me this week & I’d encourage each of you to do the same every so often, not only to help with your recall, but to remind yourself of the life that you’ve lives & the value in creating such memories that you can venture back to when doing exercises like this. It helps to bring your own life into perspective. It makes you realize just how much you actually have done & how much those little attachments along the way have shaped who you are & the things that you enjoy. Again, just wanted to share something a little different this week in hopes that it helps you to escape a little bit of the doom & gloom of our present situation here on this floating rock called Earth.

As Always, Much Love To You All,

-C

Blog: *Insert Title Here

To be honest, I’m here staring at my screen, watching the place indicator blink on what was a previously blank page with the word “blog:” typed in the title slot above. It’s been that way for about an hour now & while I don’t know if anything will come of it, I figured it was better for me to just start typing & figure the rest out along the way. I don’t know what this will be, if it will be anything at all. I can’t promise you that it will be worth your time to read or that it will change your mind about some goings on in the world at the moment, I’m just a guy sat at his computer, desperately trying to squeeze some creative juice onto a virtual page. At the end of the day is that enough? Is my lack of prophetic insight this week enough to classify it as content, is it enough to keep those who read this virtual collection of thoughts & experiences satiated for another week? I don’t know, but here I am, still typing away.

Maybe this will end up being more of a brain dump, at least that’s the direction it seems to be going following that previous paragraph. What meta commentary I have for you all this week. But I don’t outwardly know what I have that is exciting for me to talk about with you all, & maybe that’s okay too.

A part of me is sitting here saying “just delete the whole thing & go do something else, no one is going to want to read this nonsense, just call off the blog for this week until you have something interesting to say.” Then there’s another side of me telling me that that is a cop out. That I need to power through & put data to page simply for the act of doing so & to hell with the idea that having it be accepted by anyone as a genuine ‘blog entry.’ I can’t dictate how you feel about it any more than it seems I can come up for an idea for this week’s entry. But to some extent, isn’t this an idea?

Isn’t my rambling, my word vomit, some form of an idea? Because if I’m being frank, I want you to relate to me. Selfishly I want you to read this & understand & empathize with what it is to stare your weekly commitments in the face & come up dry with anything that you deem is of value. Which, let’s face it, we all can relate to.

If you’ve made it this far & haven’t snuck out on me, I applaud you & I guess I also thank you for your time & whatever persistence is driving you through this borderline nihilistic hogwash I am putting us all through. I can’t make promises that next week’s blog will be better or more interesting or that I’ll have a better grasp on a concept to present you all with because I don’t know those things & typically when I sit down to write with no knowing of where the blog will take my I eventually come up with something, but my inspiration is fleeting today it seems. Sorry for the run on sentence.

I don’t know if I can pull some profound meaning out of all of this for us to tie up in a neat little bow, nor am I sure that I want to, because in a lot of ways that would feel inauthentic & I fear would present me as a pontificating try hard. I truly don’t know where or when to wrap this or even why I continue typing as I am, but it is what it is I suppose.

I could, in theory, relate this all back to what it is to be a creative, to be expected to ‘turn on’ my creativity like a light switch, but that feels like playing the martyr, when in reality I’m so blessed to be able to do this. I’m blessed to have readers who return to this place like Nic Kidman in an AMC ad (at least that’s how I imagine it), I’m blessed to have the ability to afford a laptop, internet, a squarespace subscription, a domain, that allows me to have this public voice. I’m blessed to have a creative mind that I get to squeeze from time to time & I’m blessed with the aspects of myself that have drawn you all in to reading this, to listening to my songs, to liking my photos, etc. Again, no idea where I’m going with all of this.

I’m curious though. As I think this will be one of the last paragraphs of this open journey entry what this blog has left you with. What has it made you feel? What emotions has it brought up? Do you feel that I wasted your time or did you find some form of solace & comradery in my musings? Please let me know, if anything this blog has piqued my curiosity in the inner workings of you all & how you depart these brief sessions we share together each week.

As always,

Much love to you all,

…sorry I didn’t have something more interesting to say,

-C

Blog: Forcing Creativity

As songwriters the message that we seem to have drilled into our heads over & over again is that in order to be successful in the writing realm, or in music in general, you have to be able to force creativity at any given moment. While on the surface I don’t entirely disagree, you do need to “show up” to do your job. You need to be able to walk into a room, especially when writing for a major artist, & pull a quality song out at the drop of a hat. It’s a scenario I am sure a lot of us are familiar with even in the non-musical world, the need to tap into the creative on the fly, but something I’ve found that is next to impossible to get on demand is that of inspiration.

Inspiration & creativity often go hand in hand, especially where the art world is concerned. It tends to hit like lightning & fade quickly. The trick of striking while the iron is hot can be a difficult one. Inspiration, unfortunately, often comes exclusively from life experience. It comes from living, failures or successes in love, stories that invigorate you, adventures that flex your sense of wonder, etc. Inspiration is not something that can be faked or forced & when an attempt is made to do either it ends up being abundantly apparent.

I’m going to once again refer back to a writing camp that my dear friend Leena Regan put on, if you’ve read any of my other blogs you’ll know that bring up often. In said camp Leena really hammered in the point that if, in a writing situation, you feel like you’re pulling teeth, stop immediately. It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past for sure & I’m sure a lot of us who create have made as well. The problem that ends up arising when you force your way through painful creation is that it completely saps the joy out of creation. Your piece ends up being soulless, heartless, lifeless. It ends up being a stand in that you lock in a drawer & never look at again.

I was discussing this very topic with a producer friend of mine, Joshua Gleave, last night! We were both talking about how we feel it’s a complete & utter waste of everyone in the room’s time to try & juice a song from the pulp of your brain if the spark just isn’t there. He said that he’s had writes where he & his co-writer got a verse & chorus into a song, both looked at each other & immediately said “nah,” calling the session. I’ve definitely had the same, but I’ve often found that going from a different angle ends up igniting the fire of inspiration.

I was in a write back in October with my friend Frye & she & I had the exact same experience as Josh did above; we got a verse & a chorus in & were like “nah.” Nothing wears your creative brain out faster than writing something you’re not feeling at all or creating something you have no attachment to & know will end up going nowhere. We did end up getting a song out of that session but it was one that ultimately we both felt incredibly drawn to & inspired by.

I ended up getting burned out of writing for this exact reason. I stopped looking forward to writing because it felt like a chore, & not a fun one at that. I had always been told what I mentioned at the top of this post, write to write so you can write more & write better. I don’t disagree that we should flex our creative muscles on the daily, no argument there, but I don’t believe that has to take the form of torturous forced “mea culpa” style “inspiration.” You can be creative in other ways! Greet your day with some object writing, paint, draw, dance, sing, play an instrument, do something that gets the neurons of the left side brain firing. You can flex & maintain your creative muscles by broadening its definition for yourself & simply creating to create.

I’m sure that any of you in the virtual audience who are songwriter currently reading this can attest to the following; the best songs I’ve ever written were those I never planned to write & most of the time they were those that just came pouring out of me like lava. In addition to that, most of the best co-writes I’ve had were those where we’d either given up on writing, taking the pressure off, or had just been goofing around. Pressure, to me, brings instant death to inspiration.

Please, please, please don’t burn yourself out creatively the way I did! Find new ways to integrate your art into your life, to get the juices flowing. The songs will come when it’s time for them to, I promise, but you must be persistent & patient with them!

As always my loves, have a fantastic weekend!

-C

Object Writing: Chapel

Time & time again I've passed it; its old weathered doors, its crumbling steps, & its stained glass remnants of a faith long since supplanted from its grounds. The muffled scuff of my worn work boots click-clack along the well trod cobblestones that lie in its ominous shadow, stopping just for a second to take in its former majesty. The wind carries with it the spirits of the forgotten as it whips through the exposed rafters & returns to bear its divinity as it softly caresses my skin & lovingly lifts the straggling hairs from my brow. Tranquility. It's a rush of warmth from deep within that spreads capriciously throughout my limbs. It is memory, the recollection of time long gone & people long since passed. It is the warm hearth unto which I hang the foundations of my being, the essence of my inspiration. But with the expiration of this town so too has its chapel diminished. Short of ruin, these mildewed & rotting halls once bore witness to all the goings on we as a community shared. This sanctified ground once saw fit to host unions, separations, celebrations, & seasons of mourning. It now plays host to not but the few pigeons that call it home & the ghosts & echos of the kinship of a bygone age.

@charlierogersmusic

Object Writing: Chapel

♬ UNDERWATER WONDERSCAPES (MASTER) - Frederic Bernard