For most of my life, songwriting was a curse. I didn’t just want to do it; I needed to do it. But there was one problem: my songs mostly sucked. Over and over, I would have an idea – a riff, a line – and I would pick up my guitar, grab a pen and paper (I’m old), and get to it, thinking this time it’s going to be great. Yeah, not so much. There was always something I couldn’t get to work. The lyrics didn’t make sense; there was no central idea; I was too much of a pussy to kill my babies. So after lots of navel gazing, hair pulling and hard work, I’d be left with a song that, you guessed it, sucked. 

Then, for lack of a better explanation, God took pity on me and slammed my head into a tile wall, fracturing the back of my skull in two places and driving a bone shard or three into my brain. Jesus H. Fucking Christ, right? But I’m an atheist so I know God didn’t do a thing. No, this was on me because I had made the decision to get out of bed in the middle of the night and pee in the toilet. It seemed like the right thing to do. But I lost consciousness while doing my business (it’s complicated), and when I woke up, my head was wedged between the wall and the toilet, and after I threw up for the fourth or fifth time, I was mystified why I could not stand up.

After an ambulance ride, a CAT scan, and an MRI, but no drugs (US healthcare really is pathetic), the doctors were still mystified about why I had passed out, but they gave me the elixir that is Ativan and said I could maybe go home in a few days. A week later, I was wheeled out of the hospital to my parents’ car, and once home, I went to bed. For the next several months, I slept more than anything else, but I finally made the momentous decision to walk to the coffee shop about two blocks away. It was rough, and a few people asked me if they should call an ambulance because I was having so much difficulty staying upright and had to lie down on the sidewalk more than once, and probably out of guilt and shame, my lame brain presented me with a line: I’ve got too many demons and not enough saints. Hey, I thought, that could be a decent chorus. Back home and splayed out on the couch with my guitar, I came up with some riffage, then a verse, and long story short, I had a song. A good song. Better than almost everything else I had written. More songs followed in the coming months, a lot more, all among my best. What was going on?

I don’t know; no one ever figured it out, but ever since the accident two decades ago, songwriting has not been a curse. I might still suck, but I definitely suck less than I used to. And, to quote James Brown, I feel good.