Driving Posted by Sad Blogger , 18.3.13 at Monday, March 18, 2013, in

This blog has sort of been drifting away from writing for a while now. Perhaps I'll think of something worth writing about in the next little while, but for the time being I figure why not embrace the direction its heading? Every couple nights I sit down with my guitar and my looping pedal and tinker around with various chords and runs and I was thinking that from the outset, I described The In Between as a place to drop pieces of our imaginations...and if you ask most people, they'd say that music comes from the imagination. So I'm going to start posting some of the tracks I come up with on the looper. They're rarely longer than 30 seconds, but now and then they're either so profoundly odd or miraculously virtuostic that I think I really have to start sharing them. So I present to you, "Creating Without the Effort of Writing."

This first one I'm going to start off with is one that I've been playing for quite a long time, actually. That is to say, whenever I'm in a particular headspace, I start banging this track out and it relieves all my stress or tension or heavy boots (to borrow an expression). But I posted a poem up here the other night called Sleepdriving. Now the word "sleepdriving" comes from the title of a song by a band called Grand Archives, but the poem was inspired by a drive I took in the middle of the night several weeks ago. I just put gas in the tank and went speeding through the "prairies" and then the mountains to escape the violence of the city lights and be alone in the pitch darkness with my thoughts. At several points during that drive, it was so dark around me and the road was so twisty and turny and I felt like I was going so outrageously fast...my heart was railing against my chest and my breath was permanently caught in my mouth. And I think finally I've found a context for this track below. It's always had a sort of freeing, raging feeling, but I think now that I have an experience to go with it, the 12 lead notes in this track are about whipping through pitch blackness at 3 in the morning with no more purpose than simply outrunning the city lights.



Judge away,
 -Sad Blogger