Catching Echos

This is a book I made, mostly just for me. (natalie)

The book includes many of the songs we will publish on this site and release. These are songs and poems I wrote from age 15 to age 35. If you actually want a copy of this book, please let me know!

It’s just a bunch of poems and songs though, you know :) No pictures inside, as my son was disappointed to find :)

Here is the “forward” to the book ( which explains why I did it) :

Forward

Forward. Yes, that’s right.
I meant to call this section Forward, not foreword.

This is a book of lyrics I wrote from age 15 – 35 years old. This is a book I have written down finally, so that I can move
forward. This is a catalogue of songs, so that I can keep them
in one place, and maybe let go of the echoes of them that crowd
up my head.

I have never been good with remembering facts. Definite things that I am supposed to remember, such as names, dates,
mathematic formulas, I will forget the second you tell me.
I am just not good with facts.

Feelings, on the other hand, I do not forget. A feeling can stay with me for minutes, hours, days, years, and if it is not a good feeling, it can haunt me forever. Until I turn it into a personal fact.

Once I turn a feeling into a personal fact, I can allow myself to let it dissipate. Like many people, I turn feelings into personal facts by talking about them with people I trust. Because I am such a loner, there have been many times in my life where I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to about these things.

It is at these times that I will turn my feeling into a song. The great part about this for me is not only do I create a place for this feeling to exist safely outside of myself, but often these songs help me resolve the personal issue I had in the first place. The fun part? Re-living the feeling on my own terms for a set amount of minutes before I file it away again, somewhere back in my memories.

My husband told me ( he is really smart, but he didn’t discover this ) that as you live your life and have experiences and create memories, the brain creates pathways throughout the brain. “Like cars on a road,” he says. He reminds me not to go down roads that create negativity. Drive down new roads. Make new paths. I think this is a good idea, and I try and do this most of the time. It is a relief sometimes, to be able to *decide* which mental emotional road I want to go down when
something comes up. Here’s the thing:

I keep my songs like these roads. When I was younger and I would go to play a live set with a new song, all I would have to remember was the first word of each verse. I knew that once I got to that spot in the song, the rest of the verse would light up in my memory. Like headlights lighting up the 15 feet in front of you when you are driving at night. I took this for granted. Fast
forward twenty years and one day I have a few minutes to pick up my guitar and play some song that I haven’t played since I was a teenager. Here’s the first verse – oh this is so much fun – getting to that second verse and—whaa???  What are the %$#ing words?!!!! I can’t remember!!!!! OMG

I have a box, plus two duffel bags full of old pieces of paper, diaries, songs typed on computer, typed on typewriters, written on napkins. Yikes! Where is that one song I want to find right now?!! Which bag? Which book? What else have I forgotten?? Will I start to forget everything?
Hence this book. Did I have any idea when I was a teenager that songs I laboriously typed on an old computer and saved on a floppy disc and printed out on old computer paper (you know the kind with the holes running down each side) would later be scanned by a skilled techie older me and copied into a new text file and formatted into a book in my late thirties??!! Wow, I had no idea something like that would even be possible.

I realized while revisiting these songs that I was so unfair and unloving towards myself through all of these years. But now it is so much easier to look back on the girl who wrote these songs and love and appreciate her for who she was. I only wish she could have seen this at the time. This is the lesson for me now, because, now I know that one day I will be 55, 75, 95, 125, well this is the future right? It could happen ;) and when I am this old, I will look back at myself at 37, and feel love and understanding for who she is today. So I decided to try my best to love myself today as much as I might look back and love myself from the future.

In doing this, I will honour these songs and stories from my past, by putting them all together in this book. These are not the greatest, some are silly, some are embarrassingly shallow and badly written, but they like old friends, and so I will honour, love and accept them as they are.

Songs…I do not want to forget you. You were there for me when I was alone. You helped me understand and make sense of many events in my life and gave a sense of purpose to
everything that happened to me.

I am going to keep you in this one spot, so that I can find you easily when I lose my way in a song, driving down old roads, chasing words that fade as the years go by. So this is me
collecting, salvaging and catching echoes. NC