That Jealous Moon, Reed Foehl, and Inspiration

Well, as not-so-long-time readers, as well as anyone who knows me personally, will surely know, I've been working on writing and recording a five song EP. In December, I released a track listing, but had not finished writing all of the songs. Recently, I finished the last of them. Cue audience clapping and cheering. The song entitled That Jealous Moon, specifically, came out fantastically and I'm extremely proud of it.  However, it took me nearly two months to finish it. If you just read two minutes, snorted, and rolled your eyes in disgust, back up and read that sentence again, for I said months.

See, inspiration is elusive, hard to find, and oft times, rather fleeting.
 A few lines of music or words may come out quickly, easily, almost without effort, but then... Nothing. Several writers have described writing as not making up words, but rather plucking them from the sky or "winds of a collective human consciousness." They say that writing is not creative, but rather just getting in touch with something larger than the writer, telling a story that everyone already knows somewhere deep within the recesses of the human psyche. Some days, I find this description to be ridiculous, or a ill-executed attempt to raise the stature of the writer. But, then... Then, there are nights where I lay awake, tossing, turning, my mind unable to process the multitude of ideas floating around in my head. It's on these nights that story lines, characters, places I've never been or seen haunt me, plague my dreams, and in the back of my mind I wonder if those poets and artists were right--if I too am nothing more than a conduit to ideas that aren't mine at all.

So where does inspiration really come from? That's a question that every artist, writer, and creative mind wrestles with most every day I'm sure. I can't answer where it comes from in general, but I can trace the lineage of  That Jealous Moon to several very specific places.

Let's start at the beginning. I was planning out my EP and wanted to have some themes running through all the songs. I had one written called Words (just a man), and decided I needed to come up with the titles of the rest. I drew them from music I'd been listening to recently (namely Gregory Alan Isakov) and the themes I thought were concrete. This particular song came out of GAI's use of the moon as an underlying theme throughout both of his albums. That got me wondering what the Moon would be personified. After a moment, I realized the Moon would be jealous. Then a story started to take shape in my mind. Not long after, I had a chorus and an intro riff. The words went thusly: And that jealous Moon looks down on me/ And through the dust she's all red and gold./ And the night-jays just reply with her name/ Then silence and still.

But that was it. I struggled with it for two months. Then, recently, I started listening to a folk artist I'd heard a few times before, but never really in depth: Reed Foehl (pronounce Fail).  This is one of his songs (and this performance especially filmed by my friend, Kevin Ihle) that inspired me to finish the song.

After to listening to him for a few days, and finding a desire to finish That Jealous Moon, I went outside my apartment, sat on the porch with my guitar, a Sharpie fine-tipped marker, and my trusty worn and stained legal pad that I write lyrics on, and somehow hammered out the song in a mere number  of minutes. The next day brought a little refining and re-arranging, but not very much. And the song was finished. Here you can watch the product of my labors. It will continue to be refined, as I add more instrumentation, etc at recording, but this remains a good representation of the song.