“Sweet the soft of your cheek”

Songwriting IS magic, it turns out.

Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.

So nice of you to visit me. Since we last spoke, I delivered my younger child to her freshman dorm on the same day my older moved into his first off-campus apartment. Each in a different city, hours away from my Hudson Valley home. They’re gone. The nest is empty. So empty. I stand in their rooms and smell their smells. I sit on the edge of their beds and wonder what they’re doing now, out in the big world.

I want them to fly. I know that it’s time. But the reality of it is so much. It’s the kind of problem I’ve only ever been truly able to address in a song.

So it’s ideal that my Songwriting Is Magic Retreat will be here soon (though not so soon that you don’t have time to book your spot), and that my gig as Songwriting Professor at The New School in Greenwich Village starts next week. I’ll be working with aspiring songwriters of all ages to unravel the mystery of what makes songs work, or, barring that, to go about writing them without any clue as to what makes them work.

During a workshop at my retreat in the Catskills last year, one of the guests played a song that hit me in the heart. Many (maybe even most) of the songs that folks write and play at these retreats are fun, rocking, silly, etc. So I wasn’t expecting to be so moved. Karen Barr introduced “I Can’t Think Of Anything” by explaining that she is now an empty-nester, and she’d written it as a response to all the feelings that emptiness evoked.

I cried like a baby as she played it that day in the crowded barn. And now that she’s recorded and released it, I’m able to pull it up and cry in the privacy of my own home. It helps. Brava, Karen. Thank you.

When Karen sings “sweet the soft of your cheek/and the sigh of your sleep,” I know whereof she sings. So when folks ask what Songwriting Is Magic means? That’s what it means. It’s alchemy, mind-reading and sleight-of-hand all at once. But most importantly, it’s a healing magic, and that’s the best kind.

I welcome all advice and encouragement from those of you who have survived this nest-emptying. But I’m confident, pretty sure anyway, that I’ll be fine. Thank god for texts, FaceTime and strong bonds.

Oh, and thank god for good songs that hit you in the heart.

yrs,

Rhett