The Shed

On creative containers and sacred spaces

Hi friends - a quick note to say, I’ve got a lot of music news to share in the coming months, but I want to keep this as a sacred space for essays and longer form writing. So if you’d like to be in the loop about Half Waif stuff, you can sign up for my Mailchimp over on my website. Thanks so much for following along! <3

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It arrived last Friday like a planet. Painted green with undertones of blue, the shed came on a truck all the way from Pennsylvania. I imagined the orbital pull as it moved towards me through golden farmland and gray interstates. On my way home from running errands, I pulled onto Main Street and happened to find myself directly behind the Oversize Load. It eclipsed the lower lip of the sky. I watched it skirt the narrow rotary, sighing with relief and pride as it sailed through the circle and turned onto our street. My shed. My studio. Like a lost little duckling finding its way home.

Since River was born, I haven’t had my own designated writing space. I tell my songwriting students how important it is to carve out your corner (and it can be a literal corner!), to have your desk and gear all set up and ready to go. You want to eliminate any boundaries to the already sometimes difficult and daunting task of wrestling ideas out of thin air. Setting up your space is like Zamboni-ing the ice. You make it so that whenever you touch down, you glide.

But with my son’s arrival last June, every space in the house was slowly claimed by toys, play mats, and other rainbow-bright paraphernalia. The microphone stand was deemed a hazard and collapsed into a closet; the speakers acquired a film of dust. We did the expected parental sacrifice and made smooth ice for River in every corner. 

It feels shameful to admit: I’ve only written one or two songs in the last year. (Am I even a songwriter if I don’t write songs? says the demon in my brain.) I’ve done a lot of creative writing and work on my book—typing away on my phone during naps and on walks, slumping in the cheap swivel chair in the guest room-turned-office that I share with my husband—and a lot of back-end artistic visioning to bring a new collection of songs into the world this year. But my music gear is literally in a box in the basement. 

Creative work doesn’t fit into boxes. It overflows the lines. We can’t hem it in, can’t muscle it inside boxes of time on the calendar—it comes when it comes, it flows when it flows. It operates not with the logic of angles but with the more mystical system of intuition. This, I’ve learned again and again—how the best work seems to bubble up from the ground, a wellspring that resists shape.

But as I watched the men load the shed onto the foundation of crusher run in our yard, I understood that there are certain boxes that are helpful to the process, limitations and constraints that give us something to push up against, that give definition to our freewheeling thoughts. Even the biggest sky has a horizon line. And this is what I imagine the shed will be for me: a piece of geometry instrumental in the process of perspective. A box I can actually get behind (and inside).

Zubin tells me that in the jazz world, “shedding” is another term for practicing. It’s short for “woodshedding,” evoking the private space of a woodshed where someone can rehearse, get messy, and make mistakes before bringing the work out into the world. (We often laugh about how on tour, Zubin likes to warm up by playing trumpet inside a closet. Similar idea, but “closeting” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.)

Barbershop music also uses the term “woodshedding,” but in this case it describes the process of beginning with a melody and then working out harmonies by ear, without the aid of sheet music. It’s an act of faith, singing into the silence, trusting the right notes are there.

I resonate with both ideas—the value of unselfconscious practice and the sacred act of bringing abstract sound into harmony. But to “shed,” of course, is also to discard. Most of all, writing is that for me: a chance to release and abandon—like ballast, lightening the load.

One of River’s favorite activities these days is to dig through the trash and carry little scraps around the room. He brings crumples of paper and granola bar wrappers up to the windowsill, over to the laundry basket, lovingly places them inside his toy box. I watch him shed his bits of plastic across the floors, noting how some things he leaves behind and never thinks of again, and some he holds onto. I recognize something in his actions—how we stubbornly carry our refuse around; how sometimes we need different containers to hold what has expired.

In shedding, we create a trail, a marker, a map, an artifact. Like a snakeskin found on the side of the road, like the baby’s breadcrumbs of cardboard packaging, to shed is to say, I have been here, and here, and here. I have been here, and gone on.

This morning, I swung open the door of the shed and lay on the floor, breathing in the scent of the blond pine walls. Before bringing anything in, before the inevitable clutter of wires and ideas, I wanted to meet the emptiness. I wanted to feel it in its most basic state, when it was exactly as advertised: a place where things have been shed, pared down to nothing. Just the smell of Pennsylvania forest, the smooth linoleum cool against my cheek. It felt less like a planet then and more like a moon rover: sealed and safe, meant for venturing into a boundless universe.

So this is where I’ll be all summer. Discarding, practicing. Finding harmony with no notation. Leaving some kind of mark. In the heat, humidity slicking my skin inside this 10x16 box, I will buffer the ice of myself again. And like the Oversize Load turning the tight circle of the rotary, I’ll glide.