Thoughts on growth

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So I'm in a bit of a dilemma. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

This summer I'm planning on recording my first album, something I've thought about before, but finally the timing is right. My journey as a song-writer has been relatively slow. I don't often play with other people, something all musicians need. I also have taste in music that far exceeds my ability to play. And to top it all off, my personal journey has retarded my growth as a songwriter.

If you've read my blog for a while, or know me well, you probably know that I've been undergoing some serious life change in recent years, though this hasn't really been apparent to me until the last couple years. As I stand now, I am painfully aware of many of my own limitations, areas in which I need serious work and attention. I'm also at a point where I'm willing to own those things, willing to talk about them, willing to make them known. (For a list of my shortcomings, send me your mailing address and one of my close friends or I will be happy to send you Dayn Arnold's Shortcomings: Volume One for three monthly installments of $29.95 plus shipping and handling.) So due to my own state of denial, most of the songs I have written have been very impersonal, or masked so that the listener would think I was singing about someone else. And sure, a couple of those songs have been decent, but very few of them really meant anything personal to me. As I have progressed in my own life journey, and as I've progressed in my songwriting ability, I've discovered a different side to my writing. A side that's not as pleasant and quasi-utopian as some of my previous work. But a side that is far more real.

So the album I'm working on is tentatively called 9-Years because it is a musical journey through my last 9 years of life. As some of you know, I've had my share of ups and downs in the last 9 years. Bouts of nearly unbearable depression, anxiety, bitterness, anger juxtaposed against those few incredible and irrepressible moments of euphoric clarity, like poking my head above the clouds for a split second before my own self-pity dragged me back down to earth. My musical idea is to take a particular moment in each year, or a year's impression, and use a song to show that point in my own history. Some of those years' defining moments were awesome, and some were scrape-your-face-in-the-dirt-awful. Some were filled with despair, some with incredible revelation. So while much of this music is much better in the fact that it's more personal, some of it seems bleak. However, like all of us, we must take these life-snapshots in the context of the entire story. I'm a little afraid people will take songs out of the context of the entire album, like taking one scene in a movie as its own unit, unrelated to the rest of the story.

Anyway, I've been working on writing some new lyrics, and noticed that some of them are more hopeless than anything I've ever written for public viewing. But in the context of my life, these dark times defined where my life was to go, not where it was to stay. It's the contrasts in life that make the good times good. Without the bad, how would we know what was truly good? Or WHO was good? Think about it.