I Was a Teenage Songwriter

Oh, and I still am — the songwriter part, not the teenage part

(First in a personal series of songwriting narratives: simple recordings, lyrics, and origin stories.)

I started writing songs when I was fifteen — if you don’t count the parody of “Down in the Valley” that some classmates and I wrote in sixth grade.

Low hanging fruit.

I took up the guitar in sixth grade — I was eleven, I think. My mother graciously helped me escape the ukulele, which at that point wasn’t offering the deep, rich accompaniment I wanted for my deep, rich vocals.

Kidding. I had a light, girly voice and still do.

I had some lessons with a wonderful German woman, Mrs. Riley, who taught me classical as well as folk.

Of course I also learned from the troubadours of my generation: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor. (Lots more.) These characters hit the scene fast, one after another, and didn’t fade away.

Then the Beatles. I mean, of course.

I was a three-chord girl for a very long time, despite those mentors (in my small, deeply grooved record collection). But I started to make up for the simplicity of my guitar playing by writing my own stuff. Then I had to stretch a little.

I wrote my own songs because as an awkward girl at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and on up, I couldn’t find stuff that said what I needed to say.

But I did start with another parody.

At fifteen I was inspired by a sermon delivered by a visiting minister who surely was playing to his restless, skeptical prep school audience by asserting that Jesus was the original hippie. This was 1968, you understand.

So I wrote my extension of his premise under the covers by flashlight that night. “Christ Was a Hippie” was born and would have died an ignominious second death (sorry) if not for a woman who came to a senior recital I performed two years and maybe fifteen songs later (I’m a slow writer). She offered to underwrite a private studio album, for fundraising purposes. She had this notion that we would do better than break even, just selling the album to my classmates, and collect lots of money for scholarships. She was not correct.

Here is a current rendition of the first verse and chorus of that first song, just so’s you know what we’re talking about.

The subsequent songs were not parodies, nor funny, by and large (except inadvertently). They were meant to be poetic, heartfelt, politically earnest: you know, those were the times. As I look at the titles today, I can’t remember a lot of the songs, which is probably a blessing.

It’s not just that those were the times. It’s also that being young in any era is a really hard row to hoe. So that’s what I did to cope. All that adolescent yearning, yearning, yearning.

OMG, I was probably an AWFUL bore around the campfire, or on overnights, or in the dorm. I shudder to think.

It was a hilarious experience, recording the album. The bored engineer simply had me play through all my songs, so the performance got faster and faster. There were no breaks. There were no session musicians. There was me and there was my good old Gibson nylon string guitar.

The quality is not horrible, considering all that. Some of the songs are truly awful, but they are delivered cleanly.

This was all during the last week or two of high school. I, who had never done anything artistic that should have seen the light of day, borrowed the school art studio and taught myself how to stencil, so there would be something on the all-white cover.

Here it is (or was):

I do have a physical copy of this set of youthful indiscretions, but the image above is from an internet site. It turns out that my younger self is online in really frightening ways.

I didn’t know this. I’d rather not know this.

A few years ago my daughter discovered that relic of my past on the web. She didn’t know about the album — it wasn’t something I chit-chatted about. Some decades later, someone had found and decided to get rid of this dinosaur, and posted it on an auction site.

The album description truly captures who I was in those years.

MINA CARSON Very Rare Private Loner Folk Hippie Psych Transworld Boston OG 1970

Apparently it sold for $56. I don’t even know how to reckon with that. Some vinyl fanatic gambling on a one-in-a-million chance that it’d be worth something — someday?

I had long before lost or misplaced whatever copies I had of the album. But a few years earlier, a classmate had kindly mailed one to me. Thus, I could show my daughter that it wasn’t all made up. Of course, we didn’t have a turntable and I wasn’t about to buy one to hear something that in retrospect embarrassed me — hear it myself and let my poor unsuspecting kid hear it as well.

BUT the internet has taken care of that. Several people released individual tracks on YouTube. I had no idea.

This is the best of the few out there. What is galling is that I’m still writing about the same stuff in the same voice using the same guitar riffs.

The voice and the riffs — OK. But the same damn issues. That’s just sad. And except that I’m a boomer, it’s not my fault.

Still — I want to own what I’ve written. Not so much the stuff back then, but as an adult.

I don’t know about you all, but I drift in and out of a state of willingness to be musically vulnerable. (I’d love to hear from other people about their experiences, whether in music, or in words on paper, or in graphic art.)

So I’ve started to record my songs. I don’t have a studio, and I don’t have a band. (My bandmates, bless their souls, are back in Oregon.) I’m keeping it simple, because I suck at music technology, I’m chronically broke, and those limitations have kept me from recording these songs, both lyrics and music, anywhere until now. And that’s just not cool.

The songs — they’re fine. It’s not that the world will be bereft without them. It’s that, just as when I was fifteen, I have stuff to say that nobody else is saying in the way I want to say it. You know?

I’m using the Voice Memos app on my iPhone and a Shure MV88 mic with a lightning connector. That’s how simple I’m keeping it.

I’m not editing. If I can’t live with the first take, I do another one.

My voice gets jiggly. Notes are sometimes ‘pitchy.’ At one point I clear my throat.

Mistakes will be made.

It’s not so much the performance I want to deliver as the songs themselves, and some reflection on when and how they came into the world.

I would also love it if some of the songs got performed. I don’t want them stolen, of course — I want credit. But I loved playing some of the songs with my Oregon band (River Rocks, Corvallis-based) and I’d love it if other solos or bands wanted to cover and adapt them.

(I want to pay homage and give a shout-out to my longtime Oregon music partner and amazing songwriter, Laurie Childers. She created our band, River Rocks, and the video below, which was shot way back in 2010, and features her song, “Singing Freedom.” An earlier version of our band performed it. The video was shot at Oregon State University.)