I've been haunted the last few years by a line in The National's song, "Bloodbuzz, Ohio" where lead singer Matt Berninger half-growls/-whimpers, "The floors are falling out from everybody I know..."

It's seemed that way at times, frankly - so much so that when my own floor was falling out from under me, I couldn't contain myself any longer and I broke down in songs/lamentations aimed at trying to sort out what I was going through and what I saw others going through on (seemingly, at times) all sides around me. The couples that you imagined were rooted in bedrock 'suddenly' divorce, the cancer diagnoses of dear friends some days seem to roll in like fish counts in AK each summer, ailing and aging parents and siblings, and then our children, too, all haunting us with the truth of our own swiftly accelerating speed through life. And then, too, what happened to so and so? Where is that friend that meant the world to me and my journey my junior year of college? He/She's not even on Facebook? What's happened? How'd I get here? Where is everybody? Where's my tribe?

I don't mean to sound morose. Am I alone here? I don't think so. I'm 42, and when I do go out with friends in my "demographic" - at this "stage of life" - we frequently talk about dad or mom's cancer, the (marriage) counseling session, the court date, a favorite teacher's passing, our kids' wounds - the scraped knee to the broken heart.

I'm trying to tell you the condition under which a heart - mine, maybe yours - becomes primed, rests wide open, yawning a space that only art can reach or attempt to fill. It's days like these - in the midst of heart-pounding bewilderment and a gnawing sense of life's hastening and perhaps-unsustainable pace - that I recently collided with and encountered my "long-ago" friend Amy Meissner's return to her first love, the visual arts, specifically in textiles. (I've hyperlinked her name, above, in the hopes you will steer yourself towards her work, pronto.) Is she winning awards for her recent work? Yes. Do I love that her work's being recognized and wildly, warmly received right now? I sure do. But if it weren't receiving the accolades, the grant money, and the museum showings, and I stumbled on it as I first did - through the curious, algorithmic miracle of social media - would I still find myself quietly awed and amazed by what she's doing right now? Yes, yes, and yes. 

Amy's not such a "long ago" or distant friend, really. We both live nearby, in Anchorage, Alaska. However, as with so many good friends appearing throughout critical junctures of my life, until very recently, it'd been a little time since we'd last been in contact. Let's blame the constant striving to do right by our children and families, while then also, somehow doing right by ourselves in the process of our arts pursuits. There are only so many hours in the day.

A little over a decade ago - well before my recent return to music, and hers to textiles - we were passionately driven to try our hands at the writing craft and found ourselves in an MFA program, both studying Creative Nonfiction and mixing and mingling with the same crowd of friends outside of the classroom. I knew she had an arts background - she was illustrating children's books when we met, and I probably oozed or wore music on my sleeve even then - but not until recently did I realize the full breadth of her tremendous skills and talent. 

It's been incredible to witness - seemingly, for me, out of nowhere - this (renewed or reimagined) creativity emerge from someone you once thought you knew, or did once know in one way. The surprise of learning the passions and skills and imaginations that reside inside a single person (- and to know the person! bonus! -) and to see what they can birth to life through their craft also proves one more reason I - as a fellow aspiring, working artist - feel inspired to pursue what I do. It's encouraging to know people engaged in a creative pursuit, plain and simple. It informs and nourishes your own search and attempts to clarify your own artistic vision, and ultimately you want to give and share in the process in the way your fellow artists do so generously with you.

Speaking of which. A couple weeks ago, Amy was invited to participate in a "Blog Hop" - something I admit I've never heard of until recently. She was passed four questions about the creative process, and she was to answer these in light of her own process, and then pass the questions onto a couple of her fellow artists. You can read her Blog Hop post and see selections of her work here. 

Amy then invited me to this Blog Hop thingamajigger, and I readily accepted. I teach Creative Writing each fall at the University of Alaska, and this fall I am also preparing for the release of my second album, titled, Hope, Alaska.  The creative process, and the role it serves in my life - and the life of my students and fellow music listeners and supporters - has seemed to be a running, ongoing discussion in my day-to-day these last couple months. 

Sleep deprivation has been a running order in my weeks' menus, too. And caffeine. A lot of - too much - caffeine. My music career, as it stands, is a mostly one-man operation. And right now is "critical mass" and "hit the ground running" time. For another week or two.

So, under other circumstances, would I prove such a blabbermouth - answer these questions like I'm a barreling runaway train? Maybe. Not sure. Talking and "nerding out" about the creative process is a long held passion of mine. I loved creative writing workshops for the time we gathered and discussed material - each other's, and that of authors more widely known, loved, published than us. And I loved the craft side - hearing about what distinctly drew each of us to pursue this mysterious writing thing, how we struggled with it, reveled in it, wished it would go away, wanted it to conjure miracles of the first order. Now, I'm having another go at this "Music Thing," and Amy, her textiles. But a creative process is a process, and what follows in my response to these questions is a ramble exploring elements of my process. (And if I've written entirely too much and you can't commit to the length, please just scroll to the bottom to see who I've pitched the Blog Hop at next. Hint, cousin Dot & friend Brian. )

What am I working on?

In the strictest sense of the definition, the last few months have felt more like work than any other part of the Hope, Alaska production process. While my albums feature a full band and a lot of talent, all the musicians contributing to my records play in other well-established, full-time acts and aren’t part of a larger “JJB” team. So, I operate entirely as a solo artist, and have to work as my own manager, booking agent, etc. 

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

That’s a tough call. Music, especially in my preferred genres – Americana, pop, rock, and folk – seems one ongoing “tip of the hat” or tribute to everything that’s influenced or impacted your songwriting efforts. When people hear my music for the first time, for instance, it’s not uncommon for them to liken it or compare my sound to someone better known or more established in the field. And that’s fine. I appreciate those points of reference.

I guess my MFA and my work as a professor in Creative Writing serve to distinguish my songs from many songwriters. For starters, many of my songs have grown out of or been influenced by works of literature I’m reading. Then, too, a number of fellow musicians and mentors in Alaska, and in Philadelphia – where I grew up – have noted that they appreciate my attention to lyrics, and I’ve no doubt that’s due to my lifelong love affair with literature and poetry. In fact, while recording my last two albums up here in AK, some of the guys began jokingly referring to me as “the professor” and humorously referencing my love of poetry. I fall on poetry religiously when I’m watching a song come to life. The imagery, the way language serves a deeper function than mere telling…I could run through each of the songs on Hope, Alaska and tell you what I was reading when I wrote that song, and what informed the way I went at one or another tune.

Why do I do what I do?

(I love this question…Consider yourself warned. And please forgive my lengthy response...)

Well, first off, I’ve tried not doing this work. I've tried to not write songs, have ignored or shrugged off my creative impulses (for a variety of reasons) and have failed miserably at suppressing or restraining myself in what otherwise feels like a natural, joy-strewn, lifelong impulse to engage with the creative process.

I imagine nearly every artist over the millennia has endured the age-old question of how you’re going to support yourself while engaging with this or another craft. I think very little has changed in the universal (or Western?) attitude towards an artist pursuing one’s vocation with any degree of conviction or intention. Your family, neighbors, community, and complete, utter strangers will let you know how impractical and fool-headed you’re being. By going at this otherwise undeniable natural impulse to create, you’ve inevitably consigned yourself to a life of poverty and sickness, a la John Keats or Rilke, or one of emotional and psychological turmoil, as per Van Gogh or Nietzche.  

And yet, as any working or aspiring artist knows, regardless of how many people try to convince you that you’ve embarked on a fool’s errand, or have purchased a one-way pass to the poorhouse, their anxious, neurotic assessment of your future is nothing – absolutely nothing – compared to the hell you’ll live in if you spend your life possessed by the need to create and don't afford yourself time in your day or week to honor it on some level. I imagine I’d have saved a heap of cash in therapeutic counseling costs if I’d had enough courage to put the kibosh on all the voices and individuals who ever met my love for the songwriting craft, for example, with their rampant and bewildering anxieties, red flags, or sarcasm. 

At 42, however, Life has in the last few years staged a stunning series of “Big Life” events and impasses revealing to me that if any one thing ever proved a secure, reliable, nurturing and loving source or Center in my life, it was this impulse to “make things,” to try and lean in and make a go at song(s) and prose writing. Meanwhile, the careers, the relationships, the lifestyles, and all the institutions I was instructed to pursue or work in the service of have proven the most structurally unsound fortresses – unreliable and irreparably flawed in a few cases. To even have to pretend to engage with any illusion of security in, for example, an employment situation, now strikes me as absolutely mad. 

Finally, I think I do what I do in music because music seems the most primitive, natural, and “wild” creative art form accessible to our species. My work as a writer, for example, required an education. 

And while you are or can be taught, and should school yourself in music, too, I think music…Well, let me end this ramble with a story:

I was battling a terrible bronchial infection for a couple weeks this past summer and my illness overlapped with a bug my six-year-old contracted during that time. So, I was home from work with him for a number of days as we both battled illnesses. During one of those weeks, I realized, though not for the first time, that my youngest is singing constantly. I forget this, because it all becomes like white noise after a while, but he’s always got a song going – whether humming, rambling words, mumbling, or some combination of all of it. Sometimes I’ll ask him, “Matt, what are you singing?” And he’ll answer, “Oh. I don’t know…” And I’ll walk out of the room, or give him his distance, and in no time, without thought, he’ll just start up all over again. 

How does my process work?

Messily. A buckshot spray of words and indiscernible vocalizings towards my bedroom window or wall as I strum my guitar. Sometimes the strumming reveals a melody, other times the strumming is an exercise in seeking - trying to clarify a melody I stumbled upon while engaged in a "Winnie-the-Pooh-" or Matt-like lollygag around town, a trail, or the nearby creek.

A more accurate way to describe the songwriting process might be to flip the question over: The process works me. It chooses or finds me where I am and won't leave me alone until I give it attention. Which can be bothersome, terribly inconvenient on any given day, but I'm not complaining. I do love being caught up (or down) "in it." I find the level of focus I can achieve over one "simple" song refreshing and nourishing well beyond any physical longing or craving. 

There’s a great old Bruce Springsteen line in his song, “Spare Parts” where he shouts, “She cried till she prayed.” I think in the earliest stages of songwriting, I’m vocalizing until the words start to come. The chords and melody help cultivate the ground from which the song will grow lyrics and unearth a unified theme. Domestic duties are incredible resources, tools for helping me find my way to a lyric that will compliment the melody and/or chords. I'm not someone who can sit down and strum my guitar and sing a few lines and say, "Oh, this'll work here, and this will be the second verse," and sing some more, write down lyrics, and come up with a song that way. I have and I envy friends who sit down with a pad and pen and get to it. With a melody or a chord structure looping around my in my head as I go about my day, my body prefers to lean into some rote or mundane task, some physical work, while my mind and barely-discernible mumblings/murmurings and hums begin beseeching, reaching towards, groping recklessly for lyrics. The dishes, folding laundry, running the vacuum, or ironing a shirt for work are perfect for pitching words and lines at the void, for finding what lines will welcome the melody consuming my attention. It's the complete opposite of Zen practice - of, say, cleaning the toilet or dishes to simply/only clean the toilet or dishes. I'm a domestic-duty opportunist. After the task serves its function and I have a lead on the song, the dishes will again go unwashed for a few days, the stove will look like my kids are being raised by gorillas, and the laundry will go unwashed or unfolded until I'm haunted or pursued by a new melody.

In the meantime, I keep notebooks lying around - in my backpack, my glove compartment, my back pocket, my work desk, on the kitchen table and/or living room coffee table, and I scribble ideas into them as they come. Most lines are unusable. 

In recent years, the process has elected to work me while I'm running (exercising) or hiking around in or outside of Anchorage. I keep trying to remember to take a pen and scrap of paper along with me in my pocket, but oftentimes forget. For one reason or another, pen&paper or none, I find myself getting a few miles out on the coastal trail here, for example, and am hit with a line that seems will work great in the song I left at home a half hour ago. Sometimes the line becomes my mantra while I race home. Sometimes the line changes a little or a lot on the run or walk home. Sometimes I forget it and am singing a pale or limp version of the thing I was singing three miles earlier, which proves frustrating. 

In any case, I forget when I started doing this, but in the last year or two I started hanging large white pieces of drafting or presentation paper on my bedroom and living room walls. I must have read about somebody who does or recommends this? I can't recall how I stumbled into this practice. But it's changed everything for me. 

I keep Sharpies around the apartment on bookcases and other surfaces and in drawers. Some days, I blow in from a run, or after sitting in rush hour traffic while a line marinated in my head - or also while in the midst of doing dishes or laundry - and I race to the wall, grab the Sharpie and scribble the line or a few words on one of the sheets. I don't know why exactly, but this has become my favorite part of the songwriting process. Perhaps it's because my notebooks, and my phone, and my computer screen are pretty small, and always involve sitting still and (squinting &) honing or zeroing in on something. But this process is so freeing. I can't describe the joy that comes with scribbling big, widely and madly and with no thought of penmanship - it's like brush strokes with a painting. That's what it's most like: Painting. (I entered college as an Art major, but switched to Creative Writing.) I've warned some friends before they come over or when they arrive to consider themselves warned, that it looks like a crazy man is having a mental breakdown on the living room/bedroom walls. One friend took a look and agreed. Another friend saw it and expressed a lot of joy about the whole mess.

My songs "Olena," "Joan Didion," and "Book of Consolation" - all on my new album - were written this way. Big, sloppy, loopy lines or words scattered, buckshot spray against blank white. When a few lines began to form or resemble verses on those two songs, I hung a new sheet up and scribbled those lines out all loopy and sloppy as verses. Eventually, as the song come together, there might be two or three big papers hung on the wall. At some point - usually 3 verses, a chorus and a bridge in - I'll type them into an MSWord doc and print that and when it plays through in a way I can live with - even if it still needs a little tweaking - then I'll tear the papers down off the wall so I can make room for a new song when it comes. 

The past summer, I also started combing through my notebooks and ripping out the pages featuring stronger lines than others, and then taping or pinning those little snatches or snapshots of songs to the large white papers, too, and hanging a blank sheet alongside those and then beginning the verse/chorus for a couple new songs that way. Starting a song - something that will eventually prove very structured and detail oriented - all big and sloppy like that - really opened a window for me in my recent re-immersion in the songwriting process, and I'm not sure why exactly. And aside from describing the way it happens or works, I really have no interest in the "why" it works this way. It does for now, and it's a helluva lot of fun and so I'm rolling along with this means of getting where I need to go. Out of nowhere, there proved something wildly and undeniably satisfying about engaging the process this way, and it made the path by which the songs and I pursue each other so much more exciting and full of life.

And now...Boy, did I write a lot! It's been a busy few weeks here at my end as I prepare album release shows and details, and while on any given day I feel like I'm running on fumes, it's done nothing to restrain my capacity for rambling non-stop about music, the creative process, and my goals as a working songwriter. But let's turn our attention elsewhere now, shall we? 

Up Next in the Blog Hop:

Dear…You.

Hello.

Got a minute? Well, a few?

Settle in. I need to tell you a story.

One evening late last summer, at autumn’s threshold, I turned onto a 17-mile stretch of road that dead ends in a town called Hope, and I heard a poem.

But let me first share that I sat then on what seemed at best a stalled, and maybe wandering-lost recording project. I had by this point in 2013 nearly convinced myself that by picking up the guitar some months earlier in Anchorage, leaning again into an impulse to write and record more songs, I’d embarked on what only amounted to a fool’s errand. (Perhaps engaging the creative process is always a fool’s errand on some level, but you probably understand what I’m trying to say.)

While we had the rough skeletal outlines of eight or nine songs in place, something still came up missing in the batch. I had two or three others we could record or try to make fit with the others, but something in them didn't hold up. In short, they fell too easily into the groove of my 2012 album, But So Beautiful, and I was frankly tired, a little burned out on the tone and mood of that record. However, nothing in the songs we had culled together and tooled around with served a nucleus function for the rest; none magnetically drew all the other songs towards any glowing, electric center of the work, if there was one. (And some of us exhaust ourselves trying to achieve or find that.) There was no North Star, and so we were stumbling, aimless, no compass…

Evan and I had also hit numerous scheduling conflicts in the seven months since we’d started the project, and so – while I can’t speak for him – I carried in the back of my mind an ever-expanding feeling that I held at most only a limp batch of songs without an identity, the loose threads of a project without a shape or a name.

My sons, Sam and Matt, had a few days earlier returned from Russia with their mom, where they spent the summer, and we had some catching up to do, and a new school year around the corner. For my part, the past couple months had been riddled with compounding challenges: The day before the boys left for Russia a couple months earlier, their mom and I had finalized our divorce – a process that continued to bewilder me even two months following the court's dissolution. My father had spent a lot of the spring and summer hospitalized back East, where I’m from, addressing a health matter, and my distance from the situation left me uneasy and distressed. My employer in Anchorage, meanwhile, had recently declared bankruptcy, and our Board tasked a ragtag group of us with trying to keep our mental health social service agency afloat, to salvage it, to keep the organization from capsizing.

The best of times – after all, although it was slow going and at a stand still, there was music, and it was summer in Alaska – but it also seemed the worst of times in many ways, too.

On this particular evening, the boys and I got a late start leaving Anchorage. Late enough that nearly an hour from our destination, my five year-old, Matt, fell asleep under a blanket in the back seat, mouth agape and face smashed on a pillow against his window. But it was not so late that Alaska’s summertime midnight sun was gone. Fading, yes, and quickly, as it starts doing every August, but the landscape blushed, and Alaska’s evening light played paintbrush on the mountains and trees and highway and cast unexpected splashes of color all over the horizon. The mountains and valleys would glimmer given one bend of light and then in other moments duck into the lengthening shadows as we hurtled towards Hope.

Nearly a half hour from our sleepy little destination, Sam, then nine, announced that he, too, couldn’t stay awake any longer and disappeared under a pile of sleeping bags and pillows.

To bide the time, and ward off drowsiness, I put a CD in the stereo that a friend gave me a couple years earlier, that I had until then never considered listening to, but the subject matter of which seemed suddenly relevant. It was a talk, a lecture about engaging with poetry during periods of difficulty and challenge in our lives, particularly as we veer towards (or collide with) “midlife.” It’s the kind of thing close friends of mine will tell you I’m the target audience for, the ideal demographic.

We were turning onto that 17-mile stretch of road when the lecturer read a poem. Does it matter which poem? It might. It mattered to me, of course. (There's a picture of the poem below here & I imagine I’ll also post a photograph of the poem at the Jonathan J Bower Music page on Facebook, and probably also on twitter and Instagram. In other words, you’re welcome to read it at any of those outlets. You know where to find me.)

The author/speaker on the disc read Derek Walcott’s “Love after Love,” and given where I was at the time, it met me in a place, an inner-room where the blood pulses a little quicker, warmer - a space that seems to glow with a hot white light - a place mostly reserved my entire life for music, poetry, laughter with good friends, sleeping somewhere in the open air under the stars and, if I’m lucky, with the sound of a river, creek, ocean, or stream singing nearby.

That's an admittedly awkward attempt to try and note or pinpoint where the poem went inside me – where it reached, or how it traveled through me. Anyway, I don’t know what to make of what we term “conversion experiences” most of the time, but when I heard it, something in me noticeably shifted. I don’t know and can’t say exactly what shifted. And I don’t feel like I need to know just now either. 

Another poet, Charles Wright, in his poem “October, Mon Amour” writes:

            …Whatever untwisted your heart

                                                            is what you will leave behind.

When I heard Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love” that evening, it seemed a critical untwisting occurred. Or began to occur. Did it? Can I say for sure? How to know?

We weren’t far along the winding road leading us into Hope, when I played it again, stunned and slack-jawed after that first listen, and perhaps wanting to try and absorb it even more than I did that first time. Or maybe I simply wanted to revel in it and ponder it some more as the language, the rhythms of the lines drifted through the speakers. And it was then that Sam came up from under the amassed pile of his sleeping bag and pillow in the back seat, and wearily asked me, “Pop? Do you think you can write that poem down so we can read it when we’re at home, too?”

Out of the mouths of babes.

*

I’ve gone long. And you’ve been so gracious already. But we’re nearly there. Scout’s honor.

I won’t walk you through the weekend that followed. The song, ‘Hope, AK,’ plays around in that weekend a little bit, with snapshots of other moments occurring in my life during that period, too.

A few days later, with the rough sketch of some lyrics and a melody, I recorded a rough draft of a song titled, ‘Becomes Me,’ on my laptop and sent the demo to Evan. It was me pitching a kind of nearly-desperate, “Here’s this. But I don’t know what to make of it or anything right now.” His enthusiasm on the heels of my email took me entirely by surprise. In fact, I’ve never had a rough draft of anything I’ve written more readily or enthusiastically affirmed or “believed in” than the early sketch of that song.

A couple weeks later, playing back the first mixes of "Becomes Me" in Evan’s Wolverine Den studio, we stood watching his monitor play through our afternoon’s studio work and an idea flashed to mind. I told him, “Let’s title this one ‘Hope, Alaska.’” The words were barely out of my mouth and a part of me squirmed inside. So, what, now the boy from Philly was going to stake a claim in Alaska?  Evan was quiet, didn't immediately respond. A noticeable but silent beat hung in the air, and then Evan said, “You should title your album ‘Hope, Alaska.’” 

I wasn't looking at him when he said it, but I bit my lip, because I was fighting back the queen mother of all smiles. (On a related note: I've found it's hard to be homesick, to miss family when I'm working with Evan. Mostly because he's come to feel like family in many ways. Also, if you ever find yourself homesick or a little beside yourself alone in Alaska, strike up a conversation with his parents, Margaret and Steve. You'll feel like you just reunited with a long lost aunt and uncle, the distant family that long ago left Wherever, USA, to pioneer and adventure in the Great Frozen North.)

A couple days after recording ‘Hope, AK’, the photographer, Michael Wilson, posted to Facebook a photo album documenting his recent trip to Alaska. I wish I could say I’m one of my Michael’s biggest fans, but I don’t see how that’s remotely possible. Everyone I meet who knows, discovers, talks with, or works with Michael strikes me as his biggest fan. He and his work are easy to love, and I have followed and been smitten by his photography for over two decades. (This past summer, Over the Rhine paid Michael what may prove the greatest tribute an artist could pay another when Linford Detweiler called Michael Wilson Over the Rhine’s single greatest musical influence.)

It seems that not long after I combed through Michael Wilson’s Alaska photo album (and hastily emailed him), things really took off. Over the next couple months, nothing less than a cascade of remarkable moments and minor miracles followed.

Not a bad way to spend the otherwise darkest months of the year in our Northern climes.

Rilke wasn’t kidding: Patience is everything. Or, as those wise young women in the band First Aid Kit sing, “Things don’t grow if you don’t bless them with your patience.” (‘Emmylou’)

At the same time, it seems I’m forever fated to learn and understand those truths only through my daily, wildly spectacular bouts with impatience and restlessness. But that’s another story.

I’ve said a lot here, but in the end, there really are no words to properly convey my thanks to you for your part in actualizing this project - in bringing it the last, critical steps needed to launch the record into the world. 

You’ve supported a work that on one hand tested every inch of my faith in the creative process and in what bewildering notions I possess re: the songwriting vocation. As someone who’s only ever known how to honor and enjoy his time on earth by trying to “make things,” each of you have nearly done ‘the impossible’ – or, at least more than I grew up ever knowing was possible – and supported one man’s effort and intention to craft and then release into the world a thing aspiring towards beauty. Music has, as far back as I can remember, been my favorite thing to make; and songs, my favorite thing to write, though I enjoy writing in other forms, too (such as drafting lengthy "open" correspondence to friends, family, fellow working artists, former classmates, complete strangers, and gracious patrons of the arts).

My heart is full, which I've said time and again through the campaign. Full with gratitude, for starters, and more. We trust you’ll enjoy the record and all the other things accompanying it. I’d say, “We Hope” you’ll enjoy it (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), but there’s a ‘knowing’ accompanying this album that reaches beyond hopes. I’m proud of this effort. I know everyone appearing on the album brought the best they had to offer to the sessions leading to the finished recording and, given that, I know it stands, it holds up.

Finally, I know this, too, because you all threw your full-hearted support behind it. For which there truly aren’t enough words…

So, to each of you, without whom…

xo,

Jonathan

P.S. Derek Walcott's 'Love after Love':