there are two kinds of indie musicians: the kind with 25 boxes of shrink wrapped cd's in their garage, and the kind (like me) who finally sent 19 of them to Davy Jones last year because nobody owns CD players anymore, and it was getting depressing to store them

Hi! My name is Stevonnie, and I make and perform music as Sunday Comes Afterwards. My next YouTube livestream will be Sunday at 3 PM Eastern, but I'm also on Bandcamp and other places. sunday.band has my links.

(Some songs w/trans themes: The Pronouns Song, Brinks Truck, Plausible Deniability)

Hi! My name is Stevonnie, and I make and perform music as Sunday Comes Afterwards. My next YouTube livestream will be Sunday at 3 PM Eastern, but I'm also on Bandcamp and other places. sunday.band has my links.

(Some songs w/trans themes: The Pronouns Song, Brinks Truck, Plausible Deniability)

Sofía Campoamor's track "Amy" has been on Bandcamp for about a week, but it's just hit the streaming services as well. (Former is embedded, latter are at ffm.to/ihopeyougotm... )

That I don't know about, but I am very familiar with "formalized grammar tries to account for the way people speak, and then becomes a way to tell people they're speaking wrong," which seems similar. 😅

P.S.: I just looked back at the start of this, and I think I may have been unclear. I'm arguing with the author of the course Ankari was talking about. I agree with Ankari!

And now that this thread has gotten out of control, I think I'm going to end it here.

Look, a distraction! 👀

[throws a smoke bomb and runs off]

First, if people are going to think you're weird, that seems like their problem. Second, there are similarly weird people out there who will love you more than that first group ever will.

...but I grant that this general approach to life may help explain why I'm perpetually underemployed.

Now that I've gotten this far, I'm realizing that the point I REALLY want to make isn't "every song needs to be grounded in details" so much as "you don't need to hold yourself back from expressing yourself authentically so as not to alienate people who will think you're weird."

With that said...yes, there are different approaches to songwriting, and not every song is about narrative. It's *really easy* to find counterexamples. (My own "Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo" springs to mind. Sometimes an earworm is just an earworm!)

As for leaving room for the listener to project onto...even beyond the ability to parallel, no work of art *doesn't* have room for listeners/viewers to embellish and reinterpret. Just look at AO3. 😁

But building a bridge requires both sides to be firmly anchored, and it's the details that make that anchoring work.

(Also, it's a vividly told story, the music is a bop, and it's performed well. Nothing here is meant to suggest that the rudiments of songcraft and musicianship aren't important.)

I *have* experienced leaving home to find myself and finding fulfillment in things I was raised to find anathema.

Would I have found this commonality on my own? Perhaps not! But that bridging between my experiences and those of others is one of the great things art can do.

Chappell Roan had a mega-hit singing about a girl from Tennessee who moves to L.A. to dance at the Pink Pony Club. According to the approach at the top of this thread, this song should do nothing for me. Every part of it is alien to my experience. But I adore it.

Humans are *great* at projecting themselves onto things, at drawing parallels, at finding ways to relate. Sometimes I think it's our best feature.

We resonate with narratives that are grounded in specific details; if there's nothing to grab onto, why would we care enough to project?