ericprincessdragon

Category: Process

  • Ring Any Bells

    In our song-a-week group there are no rules about what we can submit each week other than it cannot be a previously completed song. Otherwise anything goes – an instrumental, a set of lyrics, a one minute acapella sketch or a fully fleshed out five minute production. The point is simply to write and submit something new. But in week four of the fall 2024 group, Tim brought a surprise. That Monday he sent this:

    “Here’s something I’ve always wanted to try — this week, we’re all going to write a song with the same title. I opened one of the internet’s finest random phrase generators, clicked ‘generate’ and it gave me, ‘Ring Any Bells?’ as in ‘recalling a memory; causing a person to remember something or someone.’ At the end of this week, we’ll have 14 different versions of a song called ‘Ring Any Bells?’ I vowed not to spend too much time searching for the perfect song title. This is what the void has bestowed upon us. Rejoice and be glad.”

    I was blindsided – I was already working on the song I intended to finish that week – but I took on the challenge just as many others would. My first reaction was that the title felt a bit too cliché for my taste. But I’ve found before that constraints can push you somewhere you wouldn’t have landed on your own – I talked about this in the Maytag Land entry – and this was no different. I sat with it through Monday and eventually my mind landed on past lives, which sent me back to a memory of a gal who once told me she’d had a vision of us together in a past life, in which we had held some importance. In her vision we were a king and queen and ruling together long ago. Then, as hippies do, we performed a crystal ritual in the back of a van to verify the vision. The results were inconclusive.

    I’m skeptical of past life recall – I haven’t heard anything particularly compelling to suggest we’d carry memories across lifetimes, and personally I don’t have any indication of having lived before this one. That said, I’ve lived enough of this life to feel like I’ve had several in one. I find the territory interesting to write from. This was also a period where I was reading and thinking a lot about death, mortality, and the nature of consciousness – you can see that thread running through Fallen Giant and Undertow.

    I wove in some core memories from my own childhood – sitting out in the sunny front lawn pulling petals one by one, she loves me, she loves me not, and an old birthday photo – then let myself wander into fantastical territory, imagining past lives, ancient temples, a kind of epic and magical existence I can’t claim to remember. It was a fun departure before returning to my earliest memories of this life, which are not particularly epic or magical – watching too much TV, playing video games, playing in the yard. From there back to the present, musing on the possibilities of a distant life and ultimately landing with focus and gratitude on the simple things we have today – a vision, a dream, a conversation, a connection.

    It’s quite a different type of song than what I normally write, and I’m grateful the challenge of the title pushed me there. I wouldn’t have found this one on my own. Not everyone in the group took on the title that week but in the end this was just one of ten songs written around the title “Ring Any Bells”. I always enjoy listening to the submissions and reading lyrics every week but that week was particularly interesting, what with the collective bell ringin’ and all. I’d like to share some quotes from other submission emails:

    “I gotta admit, when I read your assignment I definitely said, ‘(sigh of exasperation) goddamnit, Tim’, but I made myself have an open mind and I actually had fun with this.” — Theresa Bird

    “I too was chafing a little bit this week with the assignment but it kind of put the screws on me in a good way.” — Lazarus Pearl

    “It made me nervous and excited, which I enjoy leaning into. The lyrical theme constraint made me musically constrain as well.” — Micha Silvius

    “I love hearing all the different creations generated from the same seedling of an idea. I feel like it also pushes me to write my best songs because I know there are listeners on the other side who are going to really dig into my songs because they are songwriters themselves. It adds a little pressure to sort of bring my A-game.” — Jack Isenhart

    Here’s my “Ring Any Bells”

    You say you remember what came before
    What you stored in the core when you were four
    Before picking daisies and tearing them apart
    Saying he loves me he loves me not
    Before the melancholy gaze you gave
    That camera on your birthday

    Were you something else entirely?
    Were you the first to crawl up out of the sea?
    Seems like something you would do
    Were you a cloud before the sky turned blue?
    And whatever you were
    Were we together?

    Tell me does this ring any bells?
    Am I on the right track? Have I gone too far back?

    Yes you say you had a vision of me
    In an ancient temple I was a king
    When I spoke folks listened
    When I stood they kneeled
    You stood by my side and we lived a long time
    You were my queen and my guide
    Into the afterlife

    You ask me does this ring any bells?
    Tell me to ask a crystal if it recalls
    Me being a king and all
    I have to laugh
    Still I ask

    You say we were in a temple, I was your king
    But I was just a kid from Temple City
    Raised on TV and video games
    Before that I can't recall a thing

    I can't say that it rings any bells
    But I love to hear the stories you tell
    I know just as little of before life
    As I could ever know of after life
    But speaking on the in between
    I'm grateful you're my queen
    Hey when I call you my queen does it ring any bells?

  • Can’t Abide

    Work Work Work Work Work

    I started working at 13. A few days a week after school I bused tables, delivered drinks and food, took drink orders, cleaned and vacuumed at the end of the night, and handled cash at my uncle’s restaurant inside the El Monte Airport in the San Gabriel Valley – now renamed the San Gabriel Valley Airport. The minimum wage at the time was $6.75 an hour. For a 13 year old that felt like real money – enough to buy almost anything I wanted, which at that age was mostly CDs and music gear.

    What I remember most from that time was the feeling of being in the real world. School felt like a false reality, full of tedious drama and conflict from students and teachers alike. Work was different. People treated me with common respect. They spoke to me like a person. I was building actual skills, meeting actual people, having actual experiences.

    I worked in restaurants and a cafe through high school and into my twentieth year, from my uncle’s place to a local cafe where I learned to make coffee and espresso, and eventually Rod’s Grill, a 50s diner in Arcadia that operated for 70 years before closing in 2024. I worked there from the age of 17 to 20.

    During that time I was getting out into the real world more and more. I started studying music at Citrus College at 17 and outside of work and school I was playing a lot of music, often gigging on the weekends and going on adventures further and further away. I talked about some of these times in my entry for Our Golden Days Have Passed – and I will write in more detail about these times in future entries. I was taking less hours at the restaurant and eventually stepped away altogether to focus on traveling, just a few months before I left for Europe on a one-way ticket.

    From that point on I never took on a regular job again. Over the next year and a half on the road I sustained myself through minimalist living – couchsurfing, hitchhiking, sleeping outside, “dumpster diving” – and work exchange wherever I could find it. The summer of 2013 I worked across Ireland on a farm and homestead and in a couple of hostels and guest houses. In one summer I worked with horses and sheep, cleaned rooms and bathrooms, made beds, pulled weeds, painted sheds, helped prep and serve dinners and more. Hours of labor in exchange for a place to stay, food, and whatever else came with it. I continued seeking similar opportunities as I kept traveling across twenty-odd countries over the next few years. I did small money gigs here and there and even turned down opportunities for steadier paying work to keep moving.

    Those experiences changed something fundamental in how I think about work, time and money. Living simply, traveling on almost nothing, what I needed to be happy became pretty clear: food, shelter, people, nature, music. That’s about it. If I gave a few hours of my day to sustain a lifestyle I loved – even without making much (or any) money – that felt like a fair trade. I started to understand the difference between basic needs and higher needs. There are many things far more valuable than money.

    Traveling and returning to the US made this even clearer through contrast. The sense I got from many people I met across Europe was that their jobs were a means to an end rather than the end itself – people prioritizing close relationships with friends and family, meeting up daily as a matter of routine. My mom worked two jobs for most of my life and vacation wasn’t part of our vocabulary. Many Europeans receive nearly a month of paid vacation per year. In the US many can’t afford to take a day off even while sick. In the United States there seems to be more of a cultural expectation of devotion to the job.

    In the years before I settled in Oregon I earned occasional money teaching guitar lessons, performing and touring, doing temporary farm work, running live sound and production gigs. When I first arrived on the Oregon coast my first paying work was yard work, painting and planting for a local business – found on Craigslist. Soon after I started to find there was a real need for audiovisual skills in my area. I was unexpectedly offered work running tech for the county and simultaneously started getting more and more requests for photo, video and audio work.

    These were skills I had been developing for years with no intention of making a living from them. I took pictures and made videos, recorded and made music because I loved doing those things. And then I found I had a role to play in my community – skills that offered something beyond just making money. In recent years I’ve worked on community events, supported small businesses, venues, theaters, community groups and artists.

    I don’t work in the traditional sense. I’m a gig worker, an independent contractor, and I’ve had to establish a business entity for some of what I do. But ultimately not much has changed from the days of working farms and hostels across Europe – I’ve only continued with that same understanding of work and time. I put in countless hours into projects that don’t pay: my music, this archive, supporting friends and family, supporting community, looking after the dogs and cats, improving and building at home.

    I still travel often but the minimalist life on the road is behind me. I have real responsibilities, bills and debt to pay, and I need to earn some amount of money. But I don’t often seek work – through close connections with community, family and clients I keep my expenses low and find enough regular gigs to make ends meet and then some.

    Can’t Abide

    I recognize that for years – working odd jobs, living outside conventional employment, often broke or close to it – I could be perceived from the outside as someone who just needs to get a job. I resent the idea that the primary meaningful way to contribute to society is through holding down a job, that the J.O.B. has priority over all other forms of work and effort. I’m not lazy. On any given day I’m usually stretched thin juggling multiple projects and responsibilities, paid and unpaid, with no regularly scheduled activities and no real routine. It’s a chaotic way to live and at times I lose the balance and suffer consequences. But overall it works for me.

    In the hook I wrote: “I don’t think that a job brings us closer to God.” When I say God I’m not necessarily referring to the Judeo-Christian God. I’m talking about divinity, truth, deeper fulfillment – things I believe can be found in nature, in loving relationships, in acts of service and kindness, in our own motions towards self-actualization and genuine self-fulfillment. There are jobs that bring people closer to those things, but a job in itself is not divine. I think it’s important to distinguish between the job and the work. The work I take on needs to offer me something beyond money – I need to be building skills, contributing to something worthwhile, growing in some direction. The more time I spend on money gigs, the less time I have for the things that feel more essential.

    Can’t Abide was written during Tim Bulster’s song-a-week challenge in February 2024. I picked up the guitar to work on something else, started playing the main melody, opened a new project and had most of it within a couple of hours. I wrote a placeholder for a verse, told myself I’d come back to it, then listened the next day and realized I’d already said everything I wanted to say. That clarity – knowing when a song is finished – was something I was actively working on at the time. Around then I wrote in an email to the songwriting group: if you write what’s true to you, you can’t write badly. I still believe that.

    There’s a deeper root to all of this. Two family stories that came to me through my dad, both absorbed as a teenager. Both of them died when I was still a child – I wouldn’t hear these stories until years later.

    My dad visited my uncle on his deathbed and nervously tried to make conversation. My uncle wasn’t interested in small talk. All he could tell my dad was that he had wasted his life – he spent it chasing material things – and that it meant nothing. I didn’t feel my dad was trying to teach me a lesson when he told me this. He was expressing something that had hurt him deeply, almost from a place of trauma. But I took it as a lesson directly from my uncle to me. Like he had lived an entire life to arrive at something so that I wouldn’t have to suffer the same course and outcome.

    The second story was about my grandfather – my dad’s father, who came from Cuba, lived through the revolution, spent years working for nothing in labor camps before escaping to the United States. He worked hard his whole life and at some point was doing quite well. But through a series of misfortune and the weight of his habits and addictions he died sick and nearly broke. My dad told me that at the end he would ask to borrow small amounts of money to bet on horses at the racetrack. It hurt my dad so much to see his father die that way. I took it as a warning and another lesson – that a life built around the pursuit of material wealth is a dead end.

    Looking at what I have today – the skills, the community, the family and friends, the creative work, the home, the life I’ve built on the Oregon coast – it’s in many ways more than either of them had at the end. I haven’t been so focused on chasing money or chasing things. Everything I have came through community, family, friendship, art and travel – through the things that brought meaning to my life.

    I believe I am destined to lose everything, sooner or later. Even if I manage to keep it all to the end of my life, I will still have to let go and say goodbye. I suspect that what matters more in the end is how our efforts in life move through the world – through the people we’ve known and loved, through the art and stories we leave behind, through the work that will outlast us.

    “Can’t Abide”

    ^ Original Demo ^

    ^Live from home version^ (video below)

    I don’t want to trade my time
    Just to make a dime
    Off a dollar made for someone else

    They say I don’t want to work
    Like I’m just a lazy jerk
    Who only wants to take and give nothing to the world

    Well I don’t think that a job
    Brings us closer to God
    And all the money we make
    Means nothing in the end

    If I’m gonna take what’s mine
    Then I will take my time
    I’ve got dreams to fulfill in this life

    I’ll work for what matters to me
    I’ll work for my community
    I want to leave the world a bit better than I found it

    I know deep down
    I can’t abide the nine to five
    If I’m to live my life
    If I die broke I’ll walk that road
    I’ll go chasing the light

    I don’t think that a job
    Brings us closer to God
    And all the money we make
    Means nothing in the end

  • Musical Snapshots

    Recently I’ve been developing a concept I’m calling the musical snapshot.

    The idea is this: whatever I play or compose or improvise in a given moment is an expression of what I’m feeling at that time – some instinct, some inspiration, some emotion I may not even be fully aware of. I couldn’t have played or composed that particular idea at any other time, in a different place or state of mind. So any piece of music I write is essentially a snapshot of my creative and emotional state at the moment it was made.

    Of course there are other factors. The environment plays a role – the people around me, the conversations happening nearby, the ambient noise or quiet outside. What I’ve been practicing or listening to at the time makes its way in. So many things influence the expression, both consciously and subconsciously. But the core idea holds: the music captures something true about that moment, whether I understood it at the time or not.

    This means that returning to any musical idea is like time traveling. There’s a time capsule waiting – a connection back to a past version of myself, back to wherever I was, whatever I was feeling. When I listen back to an old voice memo or an old recording, I’m hearing something that past me left behind. And when I write about it now, I’m entering into a kind of conversation between that past self and whoever I am today – with hindsight, perspective, and hopefully a bit more understanding than I had in the moment.

    I arrived at this idea while thinking about the storytelling potential of a live set. I started arranging my songs not just alphabetically or by project or theme, but by the period of life they describe. I’ve written enough songs now that many different periods of my life can be told in song – different places I’ve lived, relationships I’ve been in, periods of travel, periods of staying still. Looking at them this way I started to see stages my life, with certain chapters more fully written than others. My childhood, for instance, is a notable gap – only recently have a couple of songs started to cover that territory.

    While thinking about performing songs in biographical order, I started to think about the fact I’m most always most excited about my newest song (finished or in progress) – and I landed on this idea that the newest ideas are closest to who I am and where I’m at at any given time. If I wanted to give an audience the most present and authentic version of myself, I should open with my newest song.

    Then I pushed the idea further. If the newest completed song is the most current snapshot, what’s even more present than that? Improvisation. Whatever I play in the moment, unplanned, is the most accurate expression of where I am right now. That’s what led me to the concept of opening a set with an improvisation – before any prepared material, before any rehearsed songs, just whatever comes out in that moment.

    In the performances I’ve done since developing this thinking I’ve been playing my newest songs in roughly reverse chronological order, keeping the spirit of the snapshot idea in mind. But the full biographical storytelling set – I haven’t fully realized yet in a live setting yet. This is all fresh territory, concepts I’ve only arrived at in the last few months.

    As for the retroactive writing process itself, the best example currently in this archive is Acaso – a song written about the house I grew up in, which integrates a piece of music I originally called Temple City Theme, an instrumental I wrote while traveling that I eventually dedicated to the city where I was raised. It’s a slightly different flavor of the process, but the essence is there: old music, new words, a conversation between two points in time.

    The clearest examples of this process in my catalog are the Alice songs – recordings made during a period living in an Amsterdam squat in 2014, which I’ve been slowly writing about from the distance of a decade. That’s a whole entry of its own – coming eventually.

    For now this is the framework. Many of the entries on this site were written this way – old music, new words, past self meeting present self somewhere in between. When you read them, that’s the conversation you’re listening in on.

  • Maytag Land

    The song was mostly composed, arranged, and recorded within my van amidst travels down to Los Angeles in February 2026.

    The song began from a Reddit prompt: “Write a song about the happy land where socks are escaping to. But try to write it in a minor key, and add some twist.”

    It’s rare that I write from a prompt but I always appreciate prompt writing for pushing me to write something that otherwise most likely never would have been considered. It provides a kind of safe distance from what I’m writing – I don’t have to feel too attached. It’s a pure creative exercise with just enough structure to give me a direction and enough flexibility to be creative within it.

    I found this particular prompt interesting and a bit curious. I struggled at first to find an approach that made sense to me. I started writing about the many socks without pairs I’ve got in a drawer and a few other things that felt too concrete. Eventually I removed myself from the story and focused instead on it being a sort of recruitment song – from the socks to the listener. As I wrote those lines I started to view them as refugees, escaping a harsh reality to a place outside of time where they will not be used and abused, ripped up, chewed up and thrown away. For the darker twist, I wrote that there’s only one way in and no way out.

    As a jumping off point I started from visualizing the laundry room at my house, which was once the studio, but now the cat room with, like the song says, litter boxes and a catio door.

    This is an example of a song where I essentially wrote most of it away from the instrument. I started with the lyrics and then began to hear them set to a melody. The majority of the melodies were composed without even touching a guitar – I sang them into a voice note while driving. It was my second night on the road, waiting out a storm near Bakersfield, where I was set up in the van working out the melodies and harmonizing them on guitar.

    I had no concrete idea for a musical arrangement at that point. I kind of imagined it being arranged for piano, or sort of toy piano – almost like a song that would be in a children’s show. But ultimately the song took on a more straightforward guitar and vocal arrangement. The melody was set before I even touched the guitar though. There are several different movements in the song and everything was driven by this changing melody.

    Here’s the response I got from the Redditor who gave me the prompt:

    “This is GREAT! Cool 70s-like sound, carefree and well-done lyrics! ‘Join us in the dryer and shut the door behind you’ 😅 And the dryer sound in the end. A fantastic choice. Thank you for making my prompt into something so nice! 😊”

    I gave them a counter prompt in return: Write a song that tells a story in reverse chronological order – starting with the end, then the middle, ending with the beginning.

    I’d like to do something with that eventually. But for now, here’s Maytag Land.

    There’s a place
    Down the hall way
    Past the litter box and catio door

    A magic space
    There’s only one way
    In and no way out

    Where all is warm
    And all is fluff
    Theres treasure there
    And softness in the air

    Everyone’s an individual
    Not a single pair
    And you can join us there

    In Maytag land
    Come join our clan
    We’ll throw a sock party for you
    Be one of us
    We are not lost
    We have each other

    Just get into the dryer
    And shut the door behind you
    Those socks, you thought were lost?
    We’ll reunite you
    The bills and coins that disappeared are waiting for you
    Your guitar pick?
    We got that too
    You can play a little doodle loo

    In Maytag land
    Come join our band
    We’ll play a sock party with you
    Be one of us
    Join our chorus
    We’ll sing together

    La la la

    In maytag land
    Time sits still
    We don’t grow old
    And don’t grow holes
    Never stepped on never trashed
    Never ripped up by the cats
    We’ve left the cold hard world behind
    And we can’t go back

    Come join us in the dryer
    And shut the door behind you