Hey guys.
As I made abundantly clear in last week’s blog, I have been extremely busy with my day job recently. Finding time to do anything other than work has been nightmarishly difficult as I have only had a few precious hours each evening to try and fit everything I needed and wanted to do in.
I’ve had to cut down on a lot of things that I enjoy doing that normally occupy my time so that I can prioritise others. That has meant watching no movies/TV, no playing video-games, no reading and no writing essays.
What I chose to prioritise was practicing music, as that is supposed to be my primary creative discipline and career aspiration. I’ve had a few gigs in the last couple of months and I have been practicing for those performances whenever I get the chance.
One gig in particular was a showcase of my own original songs, which was much more exciting, artistically attractive and creatively rewarding than the usual ‘play Wonderwall’ kind of cover gigs that I typically do.
So I spent a lot of the precious little free time that I did manage to steal on developing and practicing my original material in preparation for said gig.
I needed an hour of material to fill the allotted time-slot, so I had to polish up quite a few unfinished or undeveloped ideas into fully fledged songs. Most were extremely recent songs that I had written in the last year or so, but one or two were songs that I have been kicking around for quite a while.
One such song was Dragonfly, which I must have written over a decade ago, perhaps even longer still.
I have a strange relationship with this song. I know it is simplistic. It may even be a little cliched or (dare I say) banal. It is in the key of C and uses unbelievably obvious and unoriginal chord progression that are merely strummed on acoustic guitar throughout. Its melodic lines are child-like and simple - almost nursery rhyme simple. Lyrically speaking, it is again simple but also repetitive. Et cetera, et cetera.
All of the above are issues that I am painstakingly aware of and every inch of my musical and artistic being tells me that this song is no good and I should have thrown it away years ago. Two of my professors pretty much told me exactly that - that this song quite simply doesn’t make the grade. One for the cutting room floor. They’re probably right, of course.
The problem is - I have never found myself able to cut ties with it completely because - I just love this song too damn much. I don’t know what it is about this song, but I just can’t bear to kill it. Something about it has always endured in my mind.
Maybe I am just a simple man with simple tastes. Maybe I just enjoy playing it too much. Maybe I am stupid (probably).
Regardless, the song endures and, when I was tasked with curating an hours worth of my own original material and performing a show that was entirely and exclusively ‘just me’, I thought fuck it. Why shouldn’t I play it?
I had never once performed it before. Maybe the audience will also like it? Or, just maybe, it would bomb hard enough for me to finally decide to bury it for good?
It didn’t bomb, but it didn’t hit either. The response to it was mediocre - muted enthusiasm at best - luke-warmness at worst. That was probably the worst thing that could have happened as it brought me no closer to any sense of finality or closure in regards to this song at all. I still have no idea whether it is a song I should persist with or not.
Anyway, since that gig, I have set myself the task of producing demos of all of the songs I played that night that I haven’t already recorded one for (several I have previously uploaded to Substack). And I started with Dragonfly.
This may be the last time I ever expend any energy or conscious thought on it. If so, I am glad to make a record of it and put it out there as a time capsule of my younger songwriting self. Maybe this demo and Substack post will be the final nail in its coffin and I can finally put it to rest.
The song is about being jealous of an insect (the titular Dragonfly) because he can do something that I can only dream about - fly away from the miserable little town that I call home. I am jealous of the freedom that a pair of wings can give such a lowly creature - a sense of freedom that a higher mammal like me will never know.
This metaphoric substrate thinly masks the true meaning of this song which is (as you probably guessed) the feeling of being trapped in a time, place and life that you can’t escape from, no matter how hard you wish to. It’s about the desire to escape the rut and find something better - to literally fly away from your problems and start anew.
For the video, I did what I always do and downloaded ‘free to use’ stock footage videos from a media sharing website (PEXELS.com) and manipulated them in iMovie (filters, panning, etc). I had planned to step out of this comfort zone (crutch) and tackle one of my greatest fears - performing music to camera - but that didn’t work out.
I set up a camera and dressed up the background a bit before performing the song to camera. Everything was going swimmingly but I couldn’t get past how ridiculous I looked in the video, so I scrapped the idea almost entirely. I kept the outro of that video because I didn’t want to waste all the effort I went to making it and it somehow felt fitting to reveal myself as the performer right at the end. The footage of the piano/keyboard being played is also me but all the rest is stock footage.
Anyway, I hope you like Dragonfly. I myself have a complex relationship with it.
Thanks for listening - Pete Brennan (AKA The Common Centrist)
[lyrics]
Dragonfly
Spread your wings
If I had my own then I would fly away
And leave this town
Far away
Move along and don’t look back again
Cos the wind
Blows much harder in this town
And the days
Are much colder in this town
And the nights
Are so much longer in this town
In this town
In this town
So dragonfly
Fly away
You might find another way
Somewhere new
Dragonfly
Fly away
If your wings work
Say your goodbyes
If I had some
I’d be long gone
Dragonfly
Dragonfly
Why’d you stay?
On your wings you’re free to find a better place?
If they were mine
I’d be long gone
Floating off, to somewhere beautiful
