“One Day,” the song that lent its name to The Brooklyn Players Reading Society’s new EP, was the very first song I ever wrote. I was 23, working in coffee shops, unsure about what I wanted in life and anxious as hell about it. The words to this song had been floating around my brain for weeks, but I hadn’t yet recognized them as lyrics. I was confident in my identity as a writer, but my anxiety disorder had buried the musician in me long ago. The idea of singing my words had never occurred to me.
And then one evening, after a profound conversation with Dave in which he’d convinced me to try making music again, I found myself on the G train, lugging an enormous 88-key Yamaha home from Guitar Center, listening to those words bounce around my head.
At first I only played through scales and a few songs I remembered from talent shows, but over time, I started improvising a little – something I’d never done before. My past life as a musician had been focused on playing sheet music perfectly, and this focus only fed my anxiety. The act of sitting down and playing whatever I wanted felt freeing, empowering even.
I kept returning to a simple bass groove with a syncopated melody over it, but I was never quite satisfied. The words in my head continually protruded themselves into my mouth, daring me to let them out. One day, when I was certain that Dave and our across-the-hall neighbor were both at work and therefore unable to hear me, I finally decided to give it a try. Heart pounding, I opened my lips and sang. It was scary, but it was also amazing, and the more I sang, the better it felt.
It took a couple of weeks to work up enough courage to play my song for Dave – so long as he sat in a separate room of the apartment in silence with the lights out – but that was enough to urge me on. “One Day” grew from there until a few years later, I got up on a stage, sat behind my keyboard and started singing into a mic, Dave on the drums beside me. My fingers shook, my breath came in spurts, and I wanted to puke, but I didn’t. Somehow, I made it through the song, and when the crowd clapped and “woo”-ed for us at the end, a rush of pure glee came over me. I understood for the very first time that performing could actually be fun.
“One Day” has morphed and grown over the years, but still, whenever I play it, I feel a special kind of contentment settle in me, like all the different versions of myself are coming home together, warm and safe inside this song.
A: I write the songs in many different settings. Most work is done at home, but inspiration can spark at any given moment. I always record ideas in my phone if I’m out. You can always sing parts into your phone, which is great. Also, it helps to have an app or two to flesh out songs, and that’s been my latest drug. I helped write for a new project predominately on my Iphone 7 via the iMPC app. There’s no such thing as one way to write with this process for myself. I’ll write on piano, guitar, keyboards, experiment with sound, make beats, use GarageBand, Logic, just vocals or whatever the mood and song calls for at the time. A lot of times I come into rehearsal with a song or idea and start playing. Everybody has amazing contributions and I like to have a structure but leave room for the musicians to add their own flavor. Great music minds just make the song that much better. Lyrics are very important to me, whether they are deep or tongue-in-cheek. I have to feel the meaning in order to give off a great performance. Sometimes they come first, sometimes last.
Becky Fine-Firesheets 