Songs
A lot of my heroes are musicians. A lot of my heroes are writers. For me, Dylan, is tops in both. He’s also a painter and a welder of fantastical gates. Who says you can’t do it all? I’ve written poetry now for about twenty years. Only in the last couple of years have I started recording songs. First as accompaniment to my poems, then as a thing unto themselves. Its funny, I don’t consider myself a musician, but because I bring the same problem solving process to music as I do painting, I make songs that, as, Frank Stella says, “are convincing.” At least I’m trying to make them so.
4 New Songs!
This was a really exciting one for me - my 46th song! One of my greatest concerns and themes in my songwriting, is the condition of nature in an increasingly - if not total - anthropocentric culture. It sickens me. I had written the first part of the song - including the choral part - when I found that Jane Goodall had died. I went back and listened to her lectures and used some of them to create the soul of the song. I wrote a lead guitar part that carries the song through the second half. It expresses my emotions around the loss of Jane, wrapping around the final lyric in a staccato, somewhat raunchy line that diminishes to a restatement of the initial strings of the song in a sort of regretful, hopefulness at the end.
Can’t Cry Anymore - Sweet Jane
Life was hard for my parents. Everyday I live I grow to admire them more. In the sixties, when I grew up, everyone struggled, it seems, and my parents were no different. My Dad was a teacher and my Mom took care of six kids. Have Mercy. My Grandfather was from Italy and he became a cobbler in the United States working for the Fontius Shoe Company in Denver. Sometimes my Dad would bring home shoes that were abandoned. There was one pair he brought home for me, suede slip-ons - cool. Trouble was, the left and right shoes were slightly different colors. My Dad tried - I think unsuccessfully - to bleach them to the same color by placing them in the windowsill. This is the central image to this song, Second Hand. Although I was a second-hand-kid, I wouldn’t trade it. I thank God for my parents and for the incredible model they provided me on how to live - though, most times, I am unsuccessful in my emulation.
Second Hand
I’m Waiting was originally conceived as something else entirely, but came out as a late life hopefulness - however hollow, for what? For the fates to at last reveal themselves? It ends in a minor key as do most things for me, as a blown kiss into a wind that has long since taken the promise away.
I’m Waiting
Pink Damask Silk, is a song about memory, about fragments of the past, lost - or nearly lost. Moments of time that we think of in still pictures. Like frames of a movie that we reconstruct through memory into the sequences of our lives. We splice together the odd meaningful bits - however misremembered - and that’s ourselves. This song is a wistful and resigned wish that it is true.
Pink Damask Silk
We are the expression of the inscrutable intertwining of mystical fates. The decades that build us molecule by inch is whom we become - for better and for worse. It’s folly, but still we yearn to believe that we can make life better even against headwinds that seem to only grow more fierce and unforgiving as we get older. I wouldn’t call this song hopeful because, c’mon, that’s a mighty slim reed. Still, there is something positive in the earnestness of effort; if for no other reason than that’s what we do because we are, as the closing line to the first section of this song says, “Waiting for another turning of this little blue ball.”
I make these songs because I want to hear what I’m feeling and through that, come to know, and maybe with the smallest pinch of joy, accept the expression of my own mystical fate.
I saw a painting by an artist recently, https://www.jonathan-crow.com, of a man floating face down in a swimming pool in a suburban backyard. It was at once funny and disturbing. I wrote this song about the struggle of maintaining some kind of calm equilibrium with the full knowledge of the wolves let loose and scratching at the door. It’s a dreamy production that is a counterpoint to the collisions that happen within the song - implicitly and explicitly.
In Bed Today
It feels to me like the most enduring theme of our specific time in history is the threat of life ending by our hands. Understanding our role in this prospect is disconcerting to say the least. Finding meaning, bearing witness, even knowing how to be is a struggle. And yet, all the while we’re being drawn inevitably to some other less fearful time . Some idyll, I’d call it. And there is also love. This song is about that.
Look At Us Now
The song is a resignation. It started as a consequence of me talking to my mom and remembering my Dad who passed a long time ago. For me, it’s the story of where we have gone since that time as a country and as a people. It’s a darker, meaner time than it was then.
The first line came to me (Hollowness is bending down like rain on a line), and I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I remembered the clothes line in our back yard: the white sheets, the pins my mom pulled from her mouth to hold the sheets against the wind; simplicity and beauty and love and work.
One of the last lines of the song that bookends the sort of trajectory of time (Memories a vacuum like pins on a line), is an acknowledgment that time passes and the sheets that crisply held the sunshine and smelled like summer are gone, a memory almost lost.
October / I Stay
I have been anticipating the new Cure album for a looong time - as have a lot of fans - for many years now. The thing that makes Robert Smith’s new record so wonderful, is how he makes his music personal and universal by packing it with emotion. In this fantastic interview at Abbey Road Studios he talks at length about his Cure life.
In this love song to my wife, I’ve tried to use that example to create an emotional connection rendered as a kind of waking dream - which often - I think it is.
Somebody, probably a lot of somebodies, said that you write to find out what you’re thinking. I wrote this song called, Spending Always, as a way to find out what I was thinking about this election, and more generally this country. I would have thought it would have turned out to be something grand and anthemic. But it turned out, instead, to be more elegiac in a minor key and personal: A love story about living through it - whatever comes - together. See the lyrics on the poems page; Spending Always.
Spending Always
Wonderful Wilson
Wonderful Wilson has been gone from our lives for a summer now, but these beautiful roses above his grave remind us everyday that he is with us still. The flowers are right outside our front door, so I get to visit him everyday. It’s a comfort.
California
I love the song Pacific Coast Highway by Burt Bacharach. I wanted to try to write something as wonderfully breezy as a reminiscence of my time living in the Golden State. In hindsight, my feelings about my California Dreams are more complex, so my song, it turns out, is more wistful than breezy.
But I’ll always love California.
My friend, Tom, sent me a great piano track from his friend, Steve Cooper (click to check out his audio production website), and I immediately thought this should be a song sung in a restaurant by a guy down in his cups feeling deeply personal regret, remorse - while the restaurant continues on serving customers completely disregarding the singer and his confession.
Restaurant
So, my wife, Kris, and I just returned from a beautiful inspiring trip to the Cape, and came home to our Wonderful Wilson terribly sick. We lost Wilson just a few days later. An excruciatingly savage blow to us: The beauty and brutality of life - hand in hand.
I wrote this song for Wilson, for his example. Live in peace. Be content. Expect love.
We love you, Wilson. Thank you, my dear loving boy: I’m gonna miss you more than you could imagine!
Day After Day Yesterday
Of course, at this stage of my life, time begins to take on a whole new character. I think losing Wilson, and recognizing that, as Lennon said, life is what happens while you’re making other plans, led to this song. A song about accepting the banality of daily life as our horizons change, all the while growing keener to the rhythms of nature.
Afraid
When night falls and the tv glows, and the trees are stripped bare for winter, questions rise like smoke from an ashtray. Hard questions that make us glad for morning’s light.
Everything You See is Free
A simple little love story of a pre/post capitalism life in the world. A Garden of Eden, I guess.
She’s Not Here
This is a story about a young woman that hears a song and becomes brave enough to leave the expectations of her life and seek the unknown. It’s also the story of those left behind.
What Shall We Do
The mystery of the creative process: This song is the result of multiple inscrutable intersections - among them, a walk in the woods, a TS Elliot poem, Robbie Robertson’s passing, and a biography of James Auduban. It became a song about the ineffectual nature of our institutions and the permanence and beauty of the natural world. Ha! nothing new there…
It Falls Apart
A song about time, the aspirations of youth and life’s unequivocal hand.
Source
Everyone has something - some event, I suppose, that sets them on the unique trajectory of their life. And what I found, as I was working on this song, is how tangible that initial experience remains as we play out the rest of our lives. And how we carry it as a part of ourselves always - whether we want to or not…
Perfectness
This is a song is about how we concern ourselves with our inabilities and our lack of achievment or success. When the truth is it’s all just a made up game.
Snow at Five
This is another love song to/about my wife, Kris. It’s a kind of meditation on the urgency of love’s acknowledgment. And fear, of course, of loss.
I was working on the guitars remembering how Neil Young used dueling guitars on Down by the River. I sent the song to a friend who said it was a good start. He was right. I added an additional - heavier - guitar and it made all the difference.
Coastlines in Time
This is one of those crazy times when the song wrote itself. I wrote this and recorded this so effortlessly that I hardly remember doing it. But I love this one. It’s about loss and time. I’m not sure where this came from, but I wish it happened more often.
You Don’t Have To Wait
This is a song about a girl being watched through the window of her house while she’s watching a tv show. It takes an ominous turn. I have been listening to Jeff Beal a lot lately, and I love how cinematic it all can be. Here, I’ve tried to create a song that takes you on a little trip using woodwinds and strings and lots of other junk.
If You Didn’t Know
My wife and I were drinking coffee and talking and she said, “If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know.’ Well, with a line like that, c’mon! So wrote this song about here and all the things she brings to me.
Praying
This song is a reflection on resignation. The idea that we can change something and make it better; a mug’s game. At last what we come to know is that succumbing is release. Free to be a part of this life, in this world, at this time. Simple, right?
Dream Girl
Another love song to my girl, that grows from a slow contemplation into a groovy grind. I’d love to go back into this and put some cool horns on it. Maybe I will - someday.
The Waves
I lived in California for a wonderful decade when I was in my twenties. Someone once told me that once the ocean gets in you it never leaves. That’s the truth. This is a song about loss and hope and how time and love, if we’re lucky, carry us.
Dark Pines
The image of a man as refuse of our cruel systems came to me. In my imagination he was hiding safely under a tarp beneath the canopy of forest. This song is about his condition.
Edgartown
One day my wife was telling me about a place she knew back east called Edgartown. I looked it up and wrote this song. Turned out this song became about my thoughts on the American dream. Lost, found, lost.
She’s My
So, I am completely knocked out by the lyrics of Lorenz Hart: How they are so funny, witty, and often times tragic all at the same time. I wrote this about my wife, Kris, and recorded it in one take.
I’m Here
Somehow I got the imagery of birds falling from the sky in me. This song is about our beautiful world and how we have treated her with such recklessness.
If I Were
This is an early love song I wrote. A little bossa nova and alotta lova.
Forest and Trees
I had a kind of breakthrough with this song. I had been listening to a lot of The Cure, and loved the complexity of sound they built. As a result, I experimented more with the production of this song adding more color and depth to the imagery using more multi tracking.
October 1 You Said
I went to catholic school and the images and sounds from that time last a lifetime. As I’ve grown older, I have come to understand that just about everything we are ever told is a lie. This song starts as a reflection on the halls from a second grade classroom, and ends with near total disillusionment with authority and institutions.