desperate (adj.): 1 a : having lost hope b : giving no ground for hope
2 a : moved by despair b : involving or employing extreme measures in an attempt to escape defeat or frustration
3 : suffering extreme need or anxiety
4 : involving extreme danger or possible disaster
5 : of extreme intensity
6 : shocking; outrageous

Songwriters invariably tend to circle back to certain themes and images that resonate with them. Chris Cornell sings about snakes; Morrissey sings about being sick; David Byrne sings about houses and home life. In some cases, this circles around a single word — perhaps the crudest example is the first album from Electric Six, where nearly every song included the words “fire” and either “disco” or “dance” — and one word that I keep circling back to, particularly, is “desperate.”

In part, of course, I like the sonic properties of it: it can be two or three syllables, it’s got the dense D in front and the crisp internal consonants, and it can be spat out or caressed by a singer in a number of ways. But of course the primary thrill of “desperate” is in its meaning and its wide range of senses. It implies a loss of critical reason, a tendency towards rash decisions and wanton abandon. You can be desperately afraid, you can be desperately in love, or the situation can become just plain desperate.

Of course, my affinity for the word comes from my close acquaintanceship with its implications. My mental state tends to run periodically, with short bursts of edifying accomplishment and satisfying success bolstering my confidence and allowing the little Icarus in me to show its ugly face, followed by the inevitable plummet to earth where I’m incapable of doing anything right and every attempt at any achievement so appalls and shames me that eventually I become paralyzed by insecurity and indecision. The latter state tends to last much longer than the former.

This, I suppose, is my cross to bear.

But the point of this isn’t to bitch and moan about my fractured ego and perceived lack of agency — I’m saving that for Whingeing Wednesday, same Bat-channel. The point is that this frame of reference leads me to conceive of many acts — at least, many effectual acts — as grounded in desperation. People do what they do because they sense some limitation, real or imagined: the pressures of time, a winnowing of options, shifting external forces of some variety or other. And so I keep coming back to “desperate” both because I think it’s interesting and because it rings true. Many of my songs, both in deep catalog and current, are either about desperate character or are just twinged with the sound of desperation. (E.g. “Cold Snap,” “Status Quo,” to a lesser extent “It’s A Living” — you can hear them at www.myspace.com/joehankinmusic, if you so desire.) I’ve even already written a song called “Desperate Times,” so named after an inelegant couplet in the chorus that nevertheless describes succinctly the nadirs of the aformentioned boom-and-bust cycle: “Desperation makes my weak excuses true / and everybody knows I’m overdue.” Yet I keep coming back for more despair; maybe this is tragic, maybe it’s just my neurotic misperception, but that’s just how I roll.