The Daffodils Are Early

There’s a meme about Nashville weather conditions I’m quite fond of that goes a little something like this:

Tennessee’s 12 seasons

winter
fool’s spring
second winter
spring of deception
third winter
the pollening
actual spring
summer
hell’s front porch
false fall
summer 2.0
actual fall

When I first moved here, I was easily duped by both fool’s spring and the spring of deception, but I’m older and wiser now. I’ve come to accept the back-and-forth as part of life, and as long as the tornado sirens are quiet and the ice storms are infrequent, I’m good. That said, it does wreak havoc with my seasonal affective tendencies, which I take seriously. “Is this a lack of sunshine thing or am I actually depressed?” is a core well-being question for me pretty much from November through to April annually. This year, I’ve been lucky. Nothing serious. But as anyone who has ever been through a bad period of depression knows, you always wonder and worry if it might come back. I think that’s why so many of the songs I write tend to navigate the space between the dark and the light, since even when I feel I am in the best possible place in my heart and mind, somewhere percolating in my unconscious lies the fear that third winter might come and take me under.

My new song, “I Didn’t Mean To Get Weird On You, Baby” came out last week, and it takes its setting in the fragile space that tends to follow a low period, and riffs on two of the recurring themes in my more recent work: big love and madness. It also riffs on an old Lloyd Cole title “Don’t Get Weird On Me, Babe”1:

My song runs thus:

The daffodils are early
But winter’s not dead
I’ve got you in my bones
And you in my head
And the trees out the window
Are naked and cold
I feel bare as the branches
And nearly as old

I didn’t mean to get weird on you, baby

I don’t know Lloyd well, and though I am a fan of his music, there’s not much to be read into here, I just liked the song. In reality, the title has more to do with Charlie Sexton, the man with the best cheek bones in rock and roll, mistaking my husband Robyn for Lloyd at a bar in East Nashville some years ago, and yelling: “Hey! It’s You! Don’t Get Weird On Me, Baby!” much to my amusement. Great title, I thought, I’m gonna find a way to use that…

As a general rule, I write the titles for my songs before I write anything else, and they then sit in the Notes app of my phone forever before I come up with a melody and more words to go with it. When I finally get around to writing the lyrics, I pen them down by hand in an old-fashioned notebook, in a blue inked scrawl that is messy and embarrasses me, but that I’m too impatient to improve upon. Then I’ll pick up the guitar and sing and strum and see if a melody I like floats into place. Sometimes this happens quite quickly. Other times this takes a few months. I don’t rush songs, I like to sit with them for a while and let them reveal themselves to me over time. I’m not a song factory. I’m not an anything factory. I’m a lady who likes to sing, who is looking for a safe place for her feelings to land, who is generally resistant to deadlines, and equally resistant to churning out things for the sake of an algorithm. I’m a big believer that you’ve got to go out and live your life, marinate in your many moods and seasons, and that’s the best way to get songs, rather than getting caught up in a productivity cycle.

That said, I am self aware enough to know this is maybe another form of procrastination for me, the running around endlessly for the sake of it, pretending I am on my way to arriving at a song at some point down the line. I’m in the writing phase for a new full length album at the moment, but I also have enough songs recorded for an EP that will come out in the summer, alongside an album of live recordings from last December, so I don’t feel as though I’m in a hurry. We’re good. It’s late March, and it’s sunny. I’m gonna go for a walk.

You can listen to “I Didn’t Mean To Get On You, Baby” here.