My Name is Yonnas, and I am obsessed with my own songs. At this point, I have already established who I am to you, so let’s not dawdle. When I say obsessed with my own songs, I mean that in a good way. I have perhaps written hundreds if not thousands of songs since I first began my artistry when I was sixteen, I am twenty six now, and I swear to you, only recently have these begun to mean anything, to me, or anyone else.

What I find most difficult about making something that matters to me, is the idea of creating from some sacred space that is not the mind. The very idea of analyzing the way you feel about something takes it right out of that sacred place and places it firmly in your mind. You begin to question your own impulses and second-guess yourself, and like Jack White once said, that’s dangerous. After years of careful negotiating with myself I have learned that nothing I’m going to do is valuable as an artist if it does not originate from that sacred place, and furthermore, I have to make sure something from that first spark, the very first drop of the well water I guzzle, is in the final product. So the question is, “What is that sacred place?”

Perhaps it would be easier to talk about the songs themselves. When I say obsessed with my own songs, I mean, I listen to them constantly, and the reasons for that are two-fold. On one hand, I have to constantly double-check to be sure they don’t suck. Especially in the formative stages of demos and production. On the other, I’m trying to make my favorite music in the world, and If I wasn’t, I would have quit by now.

I know I said they only recently have meant anything, but I’m pretty sure that any time I was writing, what I was writing meant the world to me. Whether it did immediately after, or more importantly, five years later, is another matter entirely. So much of my earlier material was premeditated to the point of sterility that I can barely stomach anything I made before 2006. As I improved in songwriting, I was able to just tap into the vein of inspiration and let it gush over the page. As I improved in production, I was able to start and finish beats in a single sitting. What I mean is the better I got, the simpler the material came.

 At this point, one song I wrote recently really captured the zeitgeist of my intentions. It is called Love in the Time of Swine Flu, and whenever I think about it, I get giddy. The idea came to me earnestly enough, every morning I would go online I would see a new story about the gradual increase in H1N1 activity, and I was in the midst (and still am!) of falling in love with a very special girl. The book Love in the Time of Cholera was always fascinating in principle to me, (though I’ve never read it) and boom, it hit me. I read up on the book a bit and to my understanding, the book is not about Cholera, it’s a love story that uses Cholera as a backdrop to time-stamp it. I tossed the idea around until sonically I could hear the sounds the accompanied the visuals I was seeing. I then made the track in a fever, and was faced with writing the lyrics. In my head there were visuals I wanted to capture and general themes that mattered most to me about the topic. The way that in Mexico City, the disease was much more rampant, the city was beginning to quarantine victims, entering into a state of martial law and national emergency. Or so I believed, whether it actually was that dire was not the point – it was feeding my brain, that was the point. I could see the silhouette of two lovers against the backdrop of a burning city from the vantage of a lookout point high on some mountain. I wanted to try sync up the time-line of the disease with the time-line of our relationship. I wanted to talk about how bleeding poor I am. So I did. I began to write exactly the things I was thinking, not concerning myself with meter or rhyme, just words. The first words of the song are, “ I remember just the way it was/ the first documented case, the first time I saw your face/ the first time I fell in love.” From there I just wrote what I was thinking as I was thinking it and the song poured out of me then and there. Singing it and rapping it as I wrote it to see how it felt coming out of my tongue. Humming melodies and rhythmic motives incessantly to make sure the vocals I heard in my head were the ones I was writing. It was a boiler room of brainstorming that was like an old connect the dots game, each point A to point B leading to the subsequent point C, not knowing what the final shape was, but knowing that when I saw it, I would know it.

The process was unlike anything I had done before. There was no fragmenting or distractions, no alienation from the catalyst through hand-wringing and over-analyzing but not actual creation. Often times writers are hampered by a vicious block, but it’s not always what it seems. Sometimes, it’s not that nothing is coming, it’s that too much is coming and the process of organization can seem too daunting to ever get it done. I mean, have you ever tried to get a glass of water during a flood?

When I told Nick about what I wanted to write about for this column, he asked me something that deserves to be addressed here and now. Why do I even bother? This is not an easy path to walk and to consider that I have done this for longer than anything else I have ever done and still feel this incredible sense of infancy, what motivates me to continue? All I can say is this, for all the agony of creation the feeling I get when I dream something and make it happen gives me a sense of satisfaction that is literally a reason to live.

The swine flu song for instance, was the way I was able to deal with this doom-drenched paranoia of an impending apocalypse, my own abject poverty and this burgeoning sense of undying devotion to somebody in the breadth of four minutes. These issues in my life, and the ones I will continue to write about are things I need to deal with, to process and understand. One of the things about songwriting for me, is that I have never been able to write a song about nothing. A light-hearted ditty about drunken elation like the Black Eyed Peas and the stupid trite feeling they “got”. Every song I write has to be about something. Something definitive, if not definitively serious.

I’m not writing songs because I want to. I am writing songs because I have to, it’s the only way I know how to deal with life, and since it’s the only thing I have ever cared about, I have to figure out a way to get paid doing it, or risk dying of starvation or worse, working a job I despise. The only thing I’ve figured about songwriting thus far is that in order for me to do it right, I have to be honest – so honest that I’m not manipulating my thoughts and feelings to sound any different than what they actually are, and I have to really, really care about these songs. I have to be obsessed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 and is filed under Commentary, VOL2009.02. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.