Seventeen songs in a drawer

Confession: while the summer album was making its way into the world, I kept writing. There are seventeen finished songs sitting in a drawer right now, done and mixed and titled, waiting their turn.

People assume the hard part of songwriting is finishing. For me the hard part turned out to be pacing. If I released everything the week I finished it, you'd get a firehose for a month and then silence, and the songs would trample each other on the way out the door. Songs need a little air around them. A single you sit with for two weeks belongs to you in a way that track nine of a fifty-song dump never will.

So the drawer stays full on purpose, and every few weeks I take one out, dust it off, and send it up the road. There's one called "Neon Tide" near the front of the line that I've been impatient about for months — it's the water at night, if you've ever seen the Gulf do that trick where it holds the light after the sky's done with it.

The summer record closed a chapter. The drawer is the next one, one song at a time. I like knowing it's there — a little savings account of Saturdays.