My songwriting history

This is a long one, so bear with me. Feel free to skip to the good parts. :)

My first songwriting memories are from the early 1980s. I was a young kid sitting at my grandmother's Hammond organ, and I made a song called "Here Comes the Sunshine" (unrelated to any Beatles song). It consisted of pounding on the keys in some sort of ascending pattern while yelling, "Here comes the sunshine" followed by pounding in a descending pattern and the phrase - you guessed it - "Here comes the rain." I didn't have much of a concept of key, and the actual keys hit were rather random. I doubt anyone would have heard it and said, "Hey, that kid has talent. He should be a musician." More likely they were trying to figure out polite ways to close the door on me so they could watch TV in peace. But they let me do it.

In time, I got my own little keyboard, and I played around a lot with it. I realized early on that I had pretty much zero interest in playing music written by other people. For me, it was all about the creation of new music. It started with simple melodies, sometimes played to whatever preprogrammed accompaniment the keyboard had. My writing got gradually more sophisticated, and my musicianship grew only out of a desire to hear the music in my head out loud. I never practiced exercises or took lessons. Really, I was never a particularly good keyboardist. I never had good technique or played anything like how you were supposed to play. I was only ever good enough to play what I was writing, and I got better only as a result of writing music that was more difficult to play.

When I was about 15 or so, for the first time, I began to think of music as something more than just a little minor hobby. I started to focus on it. I got a new keyboard and 4-track recorder and began writing much more sophisticated songs, now with lyrics. The lyrics tended to be very dark, usually about loneliness and death, which was appropriate enough for a depressed 15-year-old with anxiety issues. I was drawn mostly to heavy metal music, particularly the darker end of the scale (Metallica, Slayer, etc.), although I played an instrument that was mostly unwelcome in that realm. It led to some very odd and unique music, I think. I grew a lot over the next few years.

In 1992, I went off to college. There I formed a band called Dying Breed with my friends Joe and John. Joe was an old pal I'd known since first grade, and John was a newly met friend whose passion for music was probably even greater than mine. Certainly meeting John pushed me to go a lot further than I might otherwise have gone. Joe fell away from music after a time, but John and I kept going with more experimental things. We were very influenced by the complexity of progressive rock on one hand and by the technical marvels of MIDI on the other. We got heavily into electronic music, which was a way for us to get out our ideas without having to learn to play them well first (and so a decline in instrumental ability set in). All of this culminated in an odd musical theater project that could best be called a "rock opera" (though it was a most unconventional one) called Dimensional Rift. The show was put on at SUNY Stony Brook in spring of 1996, and it stood as the peak of my musical life. It certainly seemed to be the first step in a music career.

Post-college malaise hit me hard. I dealt with a lot of personal crises that set back what had been a promising career in music. I continued to write music rather prolifically, but I wasn't doing anything with it. I would write it, sometimes record it, and set it aside. John and I pitched in and got a digital 8-track recorder and some other equipment. We had a few stalled attempts at starting up bands. Mostly, we just wrote and recorded.

Eventually, John set off on his own ventures. There had always been a division between us where I was more interested in writing songs, whereas he was more interested in creating what I call, for lack of a better word, "pieces", often very conceptual in nature. I wrote a lot of lyrics, whereas he didn't have much interest in lyrics. He was also very technical, agonizing over the proper velocity of every sixteenth (or thirty-second, or sixty-fourth) note, whereas I had a kind of broad stroke approach. He ended up doing some great work for a dance company or two, release an album, and enjoy awards and some level of success, at least on a local level.

Our parting worked out pretty well for John, but it left me kind of directionless. I linked up with a couple of other people to form a band called Crystal Lil. We wrote some songs and actually played live at a party, but we soon all went our separate ways. I often regret losing touch with them, as they were cool people.

I got involved with another band, Delano's Core, in around 2000. We mostly just rehearsed. We didn't have any real songs. It was a new experience for me, and I kind of got into the whole playing-music-live-with-other-people thing, but ultimately the lack of songwriting left me feeling empty. It fell apart without us ever playing a gig.

Then came 9/11/01. I worked for a bookstore in the basement of the World Trade Center at the time. There was a boom. I ran. What followed was utter, extreme chaos. I ended up trekking to my girlfriend's house, and a couple of months later, after another plane crash and then a disconcerting earthquake, we fled to Providence, RI. We got married and had two kids in five years there, and for quite a while, my songwriting juices seemed to have evaporated. I started working on databases at a hospital and came to really believe I'd left songwriting behind.

As it turned out, I was wrong about that. In 2005, I started writing again. The next year, we moved back to New York. I reconnected with John, who had built up his portfolio significantly by this point, and we started a project called the Very Us Artists, which would bring together musicians and artists from all over the place. I also started releasing my stuff, old and new, under the name Carpentron, and I put together a website. I have gone fully back into music mode and am once again coming up with tons of song ideas, although recording time is harder to come by when there are two little boys running around.

And that is where I am today, at least from one angle.

Whew!