"I should not be awake..."

I wrote this early this morning, pre-Monica's blog.. but I think close enough to it's creation to deserve a spot here.

Freinds, it's 2 in the morning. Why am I still awake? Well, I was working on this assignment for a class I'm auditing, and procrastination and distraction led me to start looking through some of my old compositions. What a trip that was folks. Some of that stuff I haven't looked at in years.

I was struck in particular by this arrangement of "Jesus Savior Pilot Me" that I wrote, must have been 2003-2004 school year, the year after I got back from my mission. I spent so much time on that arrangement. (I tend to hyper-focus when I compose.) And it's so impassioned! It's sort of an art song... with some oddly pop-ish harmonies thrown in.. But so romantically conceived, harmonically, texturally, so much word-painting, in fact that seemed the thing I was chiefly concerned with.

At first I was excited to have re-discovered it, and wondered why I had totally forgotten about it! But after spending some more time with it tonight.. I think it may be fatally flawed. So many pervasive errors in judgment, that really can't be corrected to create a *good* song... They just needed to grow up. And I wonder if I've done any growing up since then, musically speaking.

So you know how looking at old pictures, old work you've done, reading old journal entries, anything from the past really, can be so painful? Well, this was kind of like that, but kind of not. Somehow I was able to objectively look at this song and say, " This here and this is silly, and it's way overdone, totally over-composed. But I think this girl has promise!" I hope that doesn't sound too arrogant, but I think it does mean I've grown up some. I may just have to re-visit "Jesus Savior", a little more thoughtfully this time, maybe a little more neo-classically....