If you have ever wanted to write your own song and sing it to someone, it is good to know that you are not alone in this crazy undertaking. On a recent Monday evening I joined a group of people who congregate monthly on the second floor mezzanine at the Hotel Weatherford for this very reason. This truly inspired location—180 degrees of windows that consume the lower half of the wall and overlook the intersection of Leroux and Aspen Street—is a refuge where we aspire to make melodies and match them with words.
These brave souls are finding their voices as songwriters. They have created a safe place where you can introduce a fragile newborn phrase, even the tiniest shard of something wanting to be a song, to a welcoming audience. The songs glisten with such brand-newness and you can hear it sparkle in every word that is sung.
In our humble circle the participants hail from all ages, backgrounds, musical styles and abilities. We share the burning desire to write songs and sing them. This desire is strong enough to draw us out after a day of work and tucking the children in bed.
A short woman with graying hair speaks with a thick Russian accent and resembles a high school language teacher. She dons reading glasses from the chain around her neck and opens a worn, hardcover book of Russian poetry. She clears her throat and hums her melody, a dramatic tune that demands an accordion. She proceeds to set the Russian words from this long-dead poet to music, struggling to see the yellowing pages in the dim light.
Next, one of the regulars strums a waltz full of images of canyon wrens and blue skies framed by colorful cliffs. It morphs into a song about his frustration with Grand Canyon overflights.
Our moderator busts out a catchy reggae tune of an imagined encounter between a guy who just got a crew cut and someone with a huge head of dreadlocks sitting on the bench across the street from the barbershop, hurling hilarious insults back and forth.
Once, a bus driver from the South Rim sang an a cappella orchestral arrangement inspired by ravens doing barrel rolls on the rim of the Grand Canyon. As inexperienced as some of us are, there are still moments in each song where the raw power of a phrase or the way the chords walk down behind a soaring melody leave me breathless.
I go to feel the power of creativity hovering in the room just as much as to understand the process of songwriting. To me this art form has always maintained a magical aura. Sometimes the music and lyrics are hard-won pairings, resulting from several years of reworking, or recycled from a previous effort that wasn’t quite right.
Then there are those instances that resemble divine intervention. This is when a song appears out of thin air, almost as if the songwriter served as a medium for the muse who visited through an open window.
I have always wanted to write songs, but fear kept me from doing anything. Bits of songs started coming to me the summer I worked on the trail crew on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon when I did that drive through those epic landscapes. There was something about the tires hitting pavement and the hum of the wind that ushered melodies into my head.
But my songs always come out as hokey-folky tunes about highways and canyons and loneliness. The one I brought this evening is a recycled chord progression that will not leave me alone. It first came to me last summer at a late night campfire session on the North Rim. The version for the songwriter’s circle travels Interstate 40 on Greyhound buses and is about being young and free in a world that is large and empty and new and not being afraid of any of it. My comrades cheer me on.
Songs are gifts and when one arrives in your life it is an offering from another world, a place of mystery. The Flagstaff Songwriters’ Circle visits this place every month. I will go there whenever I need to remember what it feels like to be courageous and humble and filled with the spirit.
