Habits, Writing Song Lyrics and Beyond

One of my favorite spots in my house is a special place I created in the garage to look at the green landscape outside. Today, there is a notebook in my lap because I am working on a song lyrics that someone requested.

I feel wiser these days. I used to consider the first idea that appeared in my mind the strongest, the perfect, the most energized, and therefore the one that should be considered final. Now, I keep chiseling, correcting and polishing.

There are many alternatives when I write song lyrics or create a version from English to Portuguese. In this case I have some freedom because the composer did not specify whether the theme should remain exactly the same as the original version. But I usually keep it as close as possible. I can try to find Portuguese words that sound like English words or I can let my intuition take me to the place I like best and that makes sense to me and to my poetic background. Sometimes I follow one, sometimes the other. It all depends on the counting of syllables and the way the words originally fall in the melody. It is a puzzle, a journey, a challenge. You can learn many things about life in the process.

When I get stuck, I go do mundane things like washing dishes and cleaning the bathroom. I also learned to sit on the mat and chant which always brings me to a new beginning. Actually, this reminds me of a story Linda Ronstadt told about Brian Wilson in her memoir. She was recording a song called Adios with Brian, creating and doing harmony parts (fifteen vocal tracks!) as they went along. At one point he was having a difficult time figuring out a complicated section. After scolding himself, he sat down at the piano, played a boogie-woogie loudly and in another key, and in few minutes he was back finishing his parts with no hesitation.

There are many habits I’ve created that help me to stay in touch with the poetry of my inner child. For instance, I love to read. I do not remember seeing my parents holding a book all the time, but they definitely had a collection and showed affection for them. To me that affection meant books were magical. And they are.

I always end up looking at bookshelves of any home I visit, instead of mingling with guests. The subjects reveal a lot about the owners and their interests in some period of time.

My favorite books are biographies because I feel enriched learning about real people. There is a yearning about understanding how the human brain works against the idiosyncracies of our emotional behavior.

When I was a teenager, I made a habit of making a list of words that caught my attention on the page of a book. Then I would create my own poetry using that vocabulary. I still do that today. Another thing I love to do is to collect short passages that catch my attention when I'm reading a book. I probably threw away some notebooks with phrases that at some point in my life were important.

In addition to books, the bedside table has pens, a black marker, a nail file, bookmarks I pick up in the library, friendly animals (blue Bidu, a little lion, a little monkey), a jar of Vicks VapoRub (memory of mom,) a glass of water (since California is super dry,) an alarm clock (and sleeper) with quiet music to meditate before bed and wake me up, and a sketchbook to draw mandalas and write a haiku inspired by the day's events. Wow, how much stuff! Will I ever get rid of all this? But then, I travel and all those things disappear. Since they say home is where you are, I start learning new things all over again. What a refreshing wave of thoughts this provokes. With bountiful enthusiasm I face the opportunity of recreating each moment.