My brother and I have been talking music a lot lately. He played trombone, studies classical music in his free time, and reads books on stuff like arrangement and voice leading.

I’m more of an impressionist. How can I smear this sound across your ears and get you to feel something like the catastrophe that I feel?

Chris paints Rembrandts in sound. There’s a clear story, introduction, rising action, climax, denouement. His musical phrases are characters that enter and re-enter the scene, strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more (until they show up in a motif as part of the finale).

You know what I mean.

I’m more like a four-year-old who someone gave a box of very expensive paints.

I’m smearing color across my face (and everything else) in rapturous joy (or misery) with psychedelic abandon and the kind of confidence one can only have when one knows ZERO music theory. My “songs” are generally more of a free-verse poem, half-sung, half-chanted, and sitting alongside musical notes that may or may not form some kind of chord progression.

So it’s fun to work with him. I’m learning a lot. And he hasn’t killed me yet, so there’s that.

Sometimes, out of our talks, I do get an idea for song structure.

The other night, I was making dinner, listening to music, and the Great Algo sent to my headphones an old song, Untouchable Face, by Ani DiFranco. It’s a song about having Big Feelings for someone who’s already in a happy, stable relationship.

(The chorus is “Fuck you, and your untouchable face. Fuck you, for existing in the first place. And who am I, that I should be vying for your touch? Who am I? I bet you can’t even tell me that much.”)

And, just because it’s a fun song and I haven’t heard it in ages, I thought about covering it about a dozen different ways as I listened to it on repeat: musical theatre, punk rawk, lounge singer…

But it occurred to me that the kind of feelings one has in that situation are like a loop. You get stuck on repeat. So I made this loooong loop of the bass line and had it set to an upright bass and a cello. And then went about making a kind of trance-loop-echo chamber piece that I think is a pretty accurate aural representation of being caught in the soft gauze of ones own looping thoughts.

I’ll never make radio music. Or dance music. Or doin’-chores music. But I will keep scratching out these images of emotion caught in a moment. With the technical skill of a four-year-old who got their hands on some very expensive paints.