Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Mercy, Melody!

I blame a tiny deformity in my mouth for my terrible poetry and songwriting.

When I was a wee lad, I had superhuman hearing and a minor cleft in my throat.  The cleft—specifically a submucous cleft—prevented (and still prevents) me from closing off the back of my throat like a normal person. Or so I’m told. I went through speech therapy so long ago that my only memory of it is a tiny plastic ball covered in velcro, which I used to toss against a fuzzy dartboard while a nice lady urged me to say “lamp” instead of “mamp.“  Apparently the therapy worked, because nobody knows I have a speech impediment unless I’m very tipsy.  There are only two things, throat-wise, I can’t accomplish—blowing up balloons, and playing wind instruments.

However, the latter deficiency posed a problem for young Neil, who happened to be enrolled in a public school system obsessed with their band.  In middle school I was asked to choose which instrument I wanted to play. Trumpet? Tuba? Clarinet, flute, trombone? Those were my (affordable) options. It didn’t help that at the time I had no interest in music, and the only tape I owned was a maxi-single of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.“ God I loved that song. Anyway, I didn’t want to take lessons in piano or drumming, and I couldn’t produce a single note from the instruments the school offered, so, I abstained from taking band.

In my particular school, not-taking-band meant not-being-educated-in-music. All of the school’s budget and teacher resources were dumped into its band (who, among other things, played at the Rose Bowl annually). The rest of the students who were either too musically deficient or too cool for marching band, got to take a single music class in middle school, where we learned about the history of music, not the art. No lessons in rhythm, no memorizing note scales, no blasting simple melodies on shitty recorders, no critical listening.

In college, I took a few classes in poetry. In discussions about meaning, context, and rhyme form, I was en fuego. But when the conversation inevitably turned to rhythm, meter, and other musical terms, I would quietly curse my ineptitude.  I made earnest attempts to get better, but they fell flat.

My Sarah, a music teacher, bless her heart, has made me flashcards so I can memorize some notes.  I’m trying to learn guitar, and even though I’m pretty good at playing chords, I can’t keep time for shit.  I suppose I’m learning, but it’s painfully slow.

And although reading and critically hearing music isn’t a prerequisite for songwriting, it would certainly help me put some words in this goddamn blank Word document I’ve been staring at for an hour, for which I have a hilarious song idea all rarin’ to go, but no pretty rhymes in which to cast it.