Night Sweepers

            “People of every color, shape and type,/ work together and sweep away the night./ Night Sweepers sweep their way to the moon, sweep it white with daylight, and work smooth/ toward the Pacific Ocean, humming and singing,/ something like this:..” I watch my computer screen as I sing, and the volume indicator tells me I’m the right distance from the microphone with my guitar, with my voice.

            I have a limited audience for the songs I record. The first CD I recorded, I sent to 15 people. Three strongly advised me to quit playing the guitar altogether and to consider also quitting singing. Four never mentioned receiving the CD. They might have felt like the three who reacted negatively, but they might not have wanted to say anything about it. I work to appreciate the forthrightness of those who expressed their strong negative opinion and to appreciate the silence of those who didn’t speak at all. Eight people expressed some degree of support, including three who were strongly enthusiastic. “Keep writing songs and singing songs,” they said.

            Before I started recording my songs to CDs via my computer, I went to a local songwriters support group. The first meeting, I listened to what they said and what they sang and read their literature. Among other things, they said they supported and worked with any kind of song. The second meeting I attended, I brought my guitar and played and sang one of my songs. The organizer of the meeting asked me if I wanted a critique. I took a deep breath and answered, “Yes.”

            He said, “You don’t have a hook. You don’t have a bridge. You don’t have a chorus. Your song is much too long. Songs have to be three minutes, give or take a few seconds.”

            I immediately realized their claim to support any kind of song, meant “any kind of song that fits into AM radio programming, with much preference given to country and western.” I knew what a chorus was, but I didn’t know what a bridge or a hook was, and I have few songs that come in close to three minutes. The group and I parted company amicably, and I pursued my music alone. More power to them in their endeavors, but we aren’t actually traveling the same road.

            “Sweep a cloud top and sweep it clean./ Now I’m gonna sweep open sky a while,/ and you sweep stars out of sight.” I’m still strumming, singing, and watching the screen.

            I recently downloaded software that would allow me to cut out a mistake and splice in that piece of the song, without the mistake, from another performance. So far, I haven’t wanted to learn how to do that. In all the years I’ve worked with a computer for writing, for my website, for photography, and now for music, I’ve spent far too much time wrestling with the machine and the systems that make it work. Now, I don’t want to devote attention to learning something new about the machine. I want to devote my time to writing and music.

            But I hit the first string harder than I mean to on a backstroke, and that one overemphasized note might spoil a recording that I would otherwise be satisfied with. I’m thinking of that while I sing and play through several more stanzas. Do not quit before the end of the song, I tell myself, and I keep going.

            “Brother sweeper, sister sweeper, this sure is a bunch of fun/ getting ready for bright daylight.”

            This song comes in at about five minutes, has no chorus, probably no hook, probably no bridge. I can’t be sure about those, because I still don’t know what they are. I try to focus on the song and I try not to think too much at the same time, or I might lose the whole thing.

             “Harmonica tones and echoes of a high contralto/ in perfect harmony with a deep bass voice/ linger on the horizon / in the very early morning sunshine.”

            Finished. It might be good enough for now. I’m not trying for professional quality. I didn’t write this song to sell. I wrote it to sing. I’m recording my songs because modern technology makes it easy to do that without going into debt, and a few friends and relatives, who live far away, like to hear what I’m doing and aren’t highly concerned about hooks, bridges, standard form, nor professional quality.

            And sometimes I like to hear what I’m doing. I like to fill the room with my own recorded songs and achieve satisfaction or deep disappointment or somewhere in between when I listen to them. Often, listening to a recording gives me ideas on how to improve my performance, and I start all over again.

            I wonder how bad that one overemphasized note sounds, how the whole song sounds. I click the mouse to play the song back. “People of every color, shape and type,/ work together and sweep away the night.” Music fills the room. Oh wow, this is my kind of music. You never hear this stuff on the radio. For now, the significance of good or bad, the significance of a mis-struck string fades into the background, and I get up and dance to the song that fills the room in the bright sunshine that streams in through the big south windows.