While My Guitar Gently Sleeps

I’ve got the bug again.

For a very long time the urge to write songs has sat dormant in me. I don’t know at what point I decided songwriting wasn’t my main artistic outlet, but it happened. I’d probably say around 2015. That was right after the last full album of songs I’d put out. That album was inspired by a guitar, a Takamine parlor guitar to be exact(a parlor guitar is a small-bodied acoustic, as opposed to a big bodied dreadnought, fyi.)

My wife bought me this Takamine for our anniversary in 2014. We’d gone up to Fort Wayne for dinner and stopped at Sweetwater Sound so I could gawk at guitars before gawking at food on a plate. She knew I’d been wanting to find a better playing acoustic for a long time. I had a big-bodied Epiphone acoustic that I bought years before, but it wasn’t all that great of a player. With some luthier work I think it would be a fine player, as it’s got nice, booming resonance. But I just wanted something I could pick up and play and not worry about what it was doing to my fingertips. After picking up that Takamine and strumming it for a couple minutes I knew that was just what I was looking for. And it didn’t break the bank.

That summer I started writing songs immediately. The Takamine pulled those songs out of me with ease. I hadn’t been that inspired to write songs like that in two years, so I took the ride and a year later put out what would be the last set of songs I’d put out. Since then I’ve released some instrumental songs, but nothing with vocals. I’d felt as if I’d depleted my well of lyrics to the point that anything I’d try to write just felt trite and, well, not authentic. I’d seemed to have forgotten how to tap into that sort of poetic stream of consciousness that afforded me notebooks full of words in the past. Everything I’d attempt to write seemed like it was trying too hard to be clever, or overly obtuse. I dig odd lyrics, but they need to be masking some kind of truth. Without that personal connection words just feel artsy for the sake of art, as opposed to an attempt at connection to the listener.

For all intents and purposes, I was done being a songwriter.

I had plenty of other things to keep me occupied. Writing was filling that creative void for me. Plus being a husband and dad to three kids in various states of growing up was plenty to keep me busy. Heading downstairs into the basement studio to disappear for a couple hours didn’t seem feasible anymore. Plus, I just didn’t feel like it. Discovering painting and drawing last year has also been something that satisfies that creative side in me. I still get a kick making things and being creative, it just wasn’t coming out in songs.

But a couple weeks ago while cleaning up the basement family/music room for my son’s open house I stopped and picked up that Takamine. There was a decent amount of dust on the headstock, and the strings were kind of grimy from oxidation and for sitting on a guitar stand getting no action. I sat down, tuned it, and started playing. It felt nice. It’d been awhile since I just sat down to strum some chords and see where it would lead.

I’d been listening to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Deluxe edition a lot. In-particular were the alternate versions of the record with varying iterations of the songs I’ve come to know and love for the past 20 years. It had sparked something in me, listening to those songs. It made me appreciate songwriting again; writing melodies and pairing those melodies with words. I’d lost sight of that magic, because it is a kind of magic. Words and music together, sparking something in your head and heart that moves you in some way. That’s what inspired me to want to play guitar in the first place. Sure, as a teen it was the guitar noodlers and fretboard wizards that made me want to pick up a guitar. But before that it was songs. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath…I heard these bands growing up and it was the coming together of killer riffs plus vocals that I locked into. The guitar shredding came later.

I was inspired by songs first and foremost.

Besides Wilco, I’d also been listening to the new Youth Lagoon and Liam Kazar. Albums that had both great melodies but also thoughtful vocals that felt personal. I was being reminded of what a great song can do to you. And for you.

Strumming on that parlor guitar opened a creative line of communication from the head to the heart to the fingers that had been under construction for some time now. It made me appreciate this wonderful instrument that I held in my hands all over again. It also made me feel somewhat shameful for letting it sit for so long, collecting dust as the strings did a slow motion corrosion on the guitar stand.

Holding that guitar in my hands started to feel how it felt when I was 12-years old, and holding that cheap, generic dreadnought acoustic my parents bought for me when I first started playing. Despite its ludicrous action, bland finish, and overall garage sale quality it was mine. “This is my guitar. There are many like it, but this one is mine” came to mind. I was no marine, but I was certainly a private in the rock n roll army.

I remember the feeling of hauling my guitar to those early guitar lessons. My mom dropping me off at Jim Howie’s sadsack apartment on Argonne Road. She’d pop the trunk of the ’84 Honda Accord and I’d pull that nearly cardboard guitar case out of the back. It was like carrying a case with a Stradivarius or a Tommy Gun in it. It felt hefty, heady, and important in my 12-year old brain. Big things were going on with that case, and I was privy to it. People saw this “kid” walking with a little more pep in his step when that case was in his hands.

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In that moment in the basement as we awaited for guests to arrive with envelopes of cards and cash for my son, I held that guitar and those feelings returned. The importance of an instrument and what it can mean to someone wanting to create. Or at the very least just to unplug after a long day at work and make music with a hollow wood body and some steel strings.

I grabbed a pack of light acoustic guitar strings and re-strung the Takamine. I decided that I needed a case for my guitar, as that was one thing we didn’t buy when the guitar was originally purchased nearly ten years ago. So I got in touch with Sweetwater once again and found a Gator guitar case that would fit the Takamine “like a glove” and ordered one.

That anniversary parlor guitar is cleaned, re-strung, and now has a new home that will keep it protected from the harsh conditions of a Midwestern household. Will I write another album with it? Or even a song? I don’t know. In the last couple days I’ve gotten some ideas and have strummed some things out, so it’s promising. All I know is that I’m not going to take that fantastic instrument for granted anymore. Something in me has woken up after a long nap. I look at the instrument and the spark is back. Whether that spark creates the fire of creativity, only time will tell.