If you have writer’s block, or whatever you want to call it, should you simply forge ahead and adhere to some kind of logical writing schedule regardless, or should you wait patiently for your thoughts and feelings to coalesce coherently into some kind of transcribable shape? And if you choose the latter course — which we all know can sometimes mean waiting literally forever — is there anything you can do to help speed along the process?

A philosophically inclined friend recommends trying to go back to first principles, which to me is about making sense of the outside world from the relative safety of your bedroom using a cheap acoustic guitar and whatever clumsy, lo-fi recording apparatus is handy. (“Back in my room, I wonder then I/Sit on the bed, and look at the sky…”) Blown chords, flubbed lyrics, tape hiss, incidental background noises — that’s the aesthetic that will always be closest to my heart. 

I don’t know much about Heather Merritt except that she’s an 18-year-old songwriter who lives in the Bay Area and listens to “Willie Deadwilder” every day. But what more do you need to know? Oh, and apparently she’s far along enough in her musical explorations to have discovered the unimaginable heart-tugging utility of the D-A-Em-G chord progression. (Listen how she uses it to throw an expert sucker punch, letting the line “movies that we’ll never see” hang in the air for a moment before completing the couplet.) First things, indeed. Lovely, Devastationalist and inspiring. 

No Cure For Boredom - Heather Merritt

South American Folk Song -- Modern Lovers

The Amazing All-Girl Band, or me and Tex at least, live (but just barely) at McGovern's, 4am-ish at the end of a long night. Perhaps the rest of the Girls were already passed out at the bar? This was the song I sang for the Losers Lounge tribute to Randy Newman and somehow it emigrated into the All Girl Band setlist for awhile. Of course, at the time I had no trouble relating to what was — hidden behind a very convincing facade of drunken self-loathing — the song’s disastrously sentimental heart. Famously known to have been John Belushi’s favorite song.

Guilty - Philip Shelley and his Amazing All-Girl Band

Recorded by Stuart at his place on Diamond St. in San Francisco, probably 1990. 

Zuleika Maine

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