Greetings and Happy 2025!
The 18th song in the series is called In The Eye.
Throughout the Plant Songs project, my subject matter has largely been celebratory and positive. I think that’s mostly because the lifestyle habits that I’ve cultivated, as well as good fortune, have provided me with much to celebrate and much I want to share with you. The current relationship I have with music and the music-making process is also in a good place right now, which also contributes to this positivity. But mostly it just feels better to share the positives in today’s world.
But over the years piano playing and composing has often been a cathartic activity for me; wonderfully so, especially when I need to work through something upsetting. It’s one nice thing about being a musician. I can channel unpleasant feelings through the piano, releasing them from myself, and at least without lyrics, there’s very little chance of my expression hurting someone else’s feelings.
Composing, practicing, recording, sharing, and listening back to In The Eye, were all cathartic for me. The process went about as follows: As I was at the piano improvising, searching for a germ of an idea around which I would compose a piece, I came upon a four-chord progression that I liked. It was slow and had kind of a sad sound in my opinion. I worked with it for a while, and eventually came up with another progression that could compliment it, also four chords, also sad. I immediately thought of something I observed on December 21st at a Christmas Party gig that I had been thinking about occasionally since. I won’t tell you exactly what it was because I don’t want to complain here, and it’s probably beside the point anyway. But it was something that bothered me and made me a little depressed. When I attached this emotion to my two progressions, playing them felt good. I had a “yesssss” feeling.
Next it was time to compose a melody and solidify the form. I was in no rush, so I let the progressions stew for a day or two. When I returned to the work, I realized one of the progressions was very similar to a Sufjan Stevens song. My progression was in a different meter than Sufjan’s, and I debated continuing with it. It’s not against the law to copy chord progressions, so I wouldn’t have been breaking the rules by continuing with it. But ultimately I decided it was too similar for my own satisfaction, so I abandoned it. Then I was looking for something to precede the remaining progression, but eventually came to accept it as the beginning of the song, as I began to compose the melody.
Eventually I had twelve bars of this progressions with melody added when I felt that a new progression wanted to come next. Eventually I found four new chords and they let me to a place where I could repeat the chords of the opening progression, except they were transposed up a fourth, and had a slight modification that could lead nicely back to the original progression in the original key. I liked it, and I composed more melody, and retrofit some of the previously written melody to fit the transposition and return to the original progression. After that I played through the form a couple times to be sure it was how it wanted to be; it was. Next I slapped a title onto it; a title that references the depressing observation I spoke about earlier, and there you have it.
As I mentioned, the whole process was cathartic. Interestingly, during the recording process of many of the Plant Songs, including this one, I’ve noticed that too much emoting with my face and body movements can cause me to make technical mistakes. This song was slow and easy enough that it didn’t happen too much. But some of the others, especially the more difficult-to-play ones, improved a lot when I decided to cultivate some stillness; and I don’t hear those performances as sounding less emotional when I listen back to them, so I might be on to something. I’ll continue to observe and experiment with that going forward.
I recorded this yesterday (Tuesday), and this morning (Wednesday) I had another difficult thing happen that caused me some strife. But on my hike up Mount Beacon just after said difficulty, I was hearing In The Eye in my head and once again it helped to make me feel better. I’m thankful for music.