Songwriting: Chasing Movement

Save me from my own urge to change everything…to move for movement’s sake, to unsettle everything that You have ordained. Let me rest in your will and be silent. Then the light of your joy will warm my life.
-Thomas Merton

I have never been good at sitting idle. I have never been good at relinquishing control over my surroundings/things/people in my life that might disappoint me. My life and habits have taught me to believe that if I can keep moving, keep planning, and hold tightly the reins of all vehicles that drive time onward, then there’s always something to look forward to. I struggle when I’m stuck and at a stand still. I would much rather be exhausted and overworked than energized with time on my hands. I’d rather be late than early. Yeah, I’m that kind of person. Hope you’ll still gimmie a chance to be a friend if we haven’t met yet.

Chasing Movement was a song birthed out of an incredibly restless time in my life. We were coming on a full year of pandemic living— it was 2021 and only a few things stayed open past 10pm in our neighborhood. That was another problem, we allowed COVID-19 to move us to an apartment with a backyard all the way in South Brooklyn. It seemed like the right idea at the time, but from the first night we spent there unpacking (and cleaning all the scum off of everything, thanks NYC), we knew it was a bad choice. The apartment was too small, too noisy (wild sex from the idiots upstairs followed by regular smoke breaks by our open bedroom window), and too visible (Simba hated that the neighbors could see him running around from their 3 story townhomes; he’s a city dog, he was confused.) I was teaching a 3rd grade Spanish class remotely and part time, which gave me alot of free time to do nothing in Prospect Heights. I tried walking around, taking Sim out, looking for old book stores or a little charm that was reminiscent of my 2 year love affair with Alphabet City in Manhattan, but nothing stuck. Alex was miserable too. I’ve tried explaining to my South-Brooklyn loyalist friends that it’s not personal or against the neighborhood, it’s simply the fact that ever New York resident learns where their place in the city is eventually and they’d be foolish to deny it. (I think they believe me now that we’re back in the East Village and much happier.)
Let’s turn this long story about life in New York short—
I wrote this song because I was bored. Very bored. And bothered about it.
Such a feeling is normal for most people, but it’s torture for someone like me. So I wrote this song. As I sang the melody a’capella around our tiny apartment, I realized that I was chasing movement just to get a hit of emotion that was interesting, the opposite of calm; I wanted to create moments that were fun and magical, instead of being present in the present (“Chasing moments, blind to what is now.”)
I was frustrated with all the aspects and details of my life, I even started looking into buying property in NYC, I even chatted with Alex about having a baby, (a MAJOR sign of me not being busy enough), I even started sight reading for my piano playing. It was bad. I couldn’t speed up anything I wanted to, so I just started trying to fix all the things that weren’t broken. Somewhere in that struggle of every day life, I recorded the melody and lyrics for Chasing Movement and built the song around it over Logic weeks later.
In my last blog about writing It’s So Dark, I noted the importance of embracing the bad feelings and admitting negative spaces to myself (versus spiritually bypassing). Chasing Movement is another exploration of this kind of expression, because there isn’t really an answer to my question in the chorus, “How can I find it, silence, quiet?” In fact, it’s more irony that lives within the question because it can’t really be answered— how are silence and stillness “found”? Searching for something is active and disruptive. This song was about my desire to find a still place for my spirit.

Writing it was an exercise in confessing my addiction to constantly going and striving. The music itself is smooth and intuitive, and far more fun and playful than my usual approach to chord progressions. I like that aspect too: text-painting that lets me laugh at myself (via light hearted melodies) for being so prone to perpetual motion.

Interestingly, I almost didn’t finish this song, which meant I would’ve never taken it into the studio. I hit a wall and didn’t have anything else to say after a few verses and steady chorus. Weeks later, I came back to the song to try finishing it one more time. I remembered an old bridge I wrote to a worship song 5 years prior. I wrote it in the basement of our old Bushwick apartment (2018) to join with a worship chorus I recorded from my New Mexico worship-leader days (2016). (AKA: I went to the antique archives and dusted off an old, unused stanza):
"If you’re silent, it’s because I need the quiet and
If there’s stillness, it’s because I know you’re listening.”

The heart behind those lyrics was about choosing to settle into God’s silence and lack-of-action. As my lovely friend Kate Gungor often says during meditative times of prayer at my church, “Silence is a friend here.” So, while I have learned that my propensity for consistent doing and making and having is detrimental to everyday presence and also contrary to God’s behavior (in my humble not-God opinion), I’ve also learned to make space for silence, embrace quiet, and be very slow to fill in blanks. Blanks can be good. Being still instead of trying with every effort is actually a Christian discipline that I never respected or learned much about in my formative years.

So there you have it, this very groovy, danceable song that you want to blare over your JBL speaker at the pool, is actually about being quiet and not moving a muscle.

And that’s funny.