Dear Mary,
I watched one of your streams recently and you mentioned that you don't want to sit down to write when you're happy. I know that sad songs bring hope in their own way (they're my favorite) but have you ever tried to intentionally write a hopeful song?
- JH
Dear JH,
Thank you for this wonderful question. Ever since I was a young teenager, when I was hurting, I would take to the page to write down what I was feeling and thinking. The page became my confessional, my safe place to howl, my reprieve from the outside world. I was not able to change my feelings, but I was able to transcribe what was happening, and that felt like something. I put my story into writing, to try to make sense of it. Writing is a kind of rebellion against loss, pain. I felt that if I could make something out of it, sentences, a poem, I was no longer powerless over the events. I was fighting back. It was helpful, in some small way.
Fast forward to my early thirties. I was still keeping journals and writing, as always: when I was disturbed. But I also began writing songs. And songwriting became my focus. By the time I was forty, I'd quit my job, moved to Nashville, and made songwriting my job, and a way of life.
It is true that when I am happy, it is hard for me to sit myself down to write a song. Songwriting is hard work, it’s effortful, sometimes a torment. It takes quite a bit of focus for me to get it right. When I am feeling great, I just want to enjoy my happiness. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself more and more at peace, less tormented by emotional extremes, and this steadiness has me believing that I am a fairly happy person. So I have had to learn how to write for reasons other than pain. This was not true for much of my life.
So, you ask, have I ever tried to intentionally write a hopeful song? Writing, whether it's a song, a journal entry, a poem, a short story, a book, is in and of itself an act of hope. People without hope do not write. Hope is what fuels the effort. Hope for clarity, hope for understanding, resonance.
I didn't know it when I was younger, but writing helped me to become my own witness. And this made me stronger. Being witnessed locked in a new connection to myself and others, it moved things around inside me. In many ways, taking a step back by writing my story shifted me from being the story, to becoming the storyteller. It helped me heal. Storytellers have power. Storytellers get to shape the story.
But I digress. Do I try to intentionally write hopeful songs? No, I don’t. I try to write honest songs. My mission, always, is to find emotional truth. As I chase that truth down, my job is to listen, pull the song into this world across time and space, through the mystery, and shape it into a form that can be sung and understood by people everywhere. I am a song chaser, a song catcher, a song hunter. I am an archeologist, digging up bones, trying to reconstruct something that already is. All I can do is transcribe what I find there, in the mysterious fires of creation. Songs come through me more than from me, and the best of them know who they are when they arrive. I look to the song for direction, and it will tell me who it is. My work is to listen more than talk. I do not impose myself, and I do not impose hope. That would be arrogant. The best I can do is be vulnerable, brave, and emotionally honest. That’s my holy grail, and it does not change.
There’s hope in that, yes?
- Mary