Cerebellum Blues

Not a bad place to subject yourself to the torture of writing lyrics.

I don't really know what it's like for other songwriters, but for me writing good lyrics is hard. Almost as hard as writing good music. So I'm always on the the hunt for places that are fairly easy for me to get to and where plopping down with a pen and a notebook is about as comfortable and pleasant as it's ever gonna get.

Ages ago, I discovered the spot in the photo, which is located about four blocks up the hill from my apartment. To get to it, you have a trek a long, narrow set of stairs, and while the climb would certainly not be so bad for a healthy person, for me, the narrowness and the steep rise can bring on the vertigo in a bad way.

Lately, though, I've found a trick for navigating such passages that works pretty well for me: look down, never, ever, look up. Suffice it to say, now that I can get to this spot without ruining the rest of my day, I've been frequenting it quite a bit more. Oddly enough, though, despite the beauty of the setting, I find I get my best ideas either walking to it or walking from it. Weird. But, hey, even if I get nothing done, I certainly get a great view.

More thoughts on depression and songwriting.

Since thwacking my head against the bathroom wall and mushing a tiny bit of my cerebellum, I've been under doctor's orders to take antidepressants. I started with Lexapro, then switched to Cymbalta, since there's evidence that Cymbalta can help with damaged nerve pathways, which I seem to have along with my crunched cranial cells. But here's the interesting part: Both drugs have been a boon to my creativity, which is counterintuitive, you know? We all tend to think of great art arising out of great struggle (not that my art is very great), and while I actually believe this to be true, in my case, the antidepressents free my mind from its joyous downward spiral and allow it to actually think about and process some of my hopes and fears. in other words, I can make sense of stuff, and in the process of making sense, my maddeningly embattled brain seems to be willing to give up little nuggets of clarity, little summations that pop out as lines describing an idea, and those lines and ideas become songs. Without the antidepressants, there is never enough calm in my skull to allow such ideas to form and rise to the surface. Has anyone else out there had a similar experience or the complete opposite? Would love to hear about other's experiences, especially within the realm of making music.