i bought a box of pencils today when i was out, and just now sat down with a clean legal pad and sharpened one up and started scribbling a few notes. i wrote most of my early songs with pencil on yellow legal pads. then i switched to fountain pen and never looked back.
pencils don’t seem the same as i remember them. these are real wood pencils but they feel sort of lightweight, not quite balsa, but not hickory either. my fingers get a little cramped up pressuring the graphite onto the page. the one true advantage of a pencil is the eraser. when you flip a pencil around and tap the eraser on a legal pad it behaves like a drum stick on a snare head, with lots of bounce for rolling out triplets.