New Songs
“I want to fill my pictures with painting.” Vincent Van Gogh
I am startled to find the creative process - picture making and music making - so similar.
For me, these two abstract practices use the language of imagery and of sound in the same way, and I find equivalencies between them. For example, sound is like color, tone like key, instruments like line. And both are about the mysterious process of conveying emotions uniquely in a form that only their non-verbal language can. As Jean Sebelius said ,“Music begins where the possibilities of language end.”
These songs are a continuation of the process of song making I started several years ago, and now with 50 or more songs under my belt, I feel I am barely touching the surface of some very deep and mysterious waters—fathoms yet to be discovered.
Never Was A Time Like This
This song was an alarming one for me. It’s about things gone wrong. Bad beginnings, and lonely nostalgic endings. It has an insistence that sweeps in, relents in an ill considered nostalgia, comes back with a vengeance, and relentless tenacity.
I wrote this song some time ago, it was my 38th song. I really liked the this one, the haunting imagery of birds falling, upside down trucks, clear running streams. But it felt it should have more drive. So I reworked it a bit, and added a single heavy raunchy guitar part that insinuates itself throughout the song. I dig it.
Oh my - the mystery. This song is about time. It’s about longing for the past, facing the present with all of its regrets, and building a transcendent future —that in this song takes the form of a crescendo in the final half of the song. Mahler instructs! The song ends with a surprise that puts it all into perspective.