This song has undergone a pretty substantial transformation since I wrote it. Originally it was a much harder-driving song, very electric and groovy (click here for the first post). Then, after playing around with Morgan and Nando, the song grew into a much steadier, kind of gentler thing.
The kernel for this song first appeared in the New Mexico desert many years ago in a song I wrote called “Sow the Seeds”. Unfortunately, the song didn’t hold up over the years, but in it was the line: “You can run around the world but you can’t escape your death,” which I culled and used in this one. I also grabbed the first line (”One thing I know is you’ve got to be strong”) from a song I wrote in college and used to holler from the loggia outside my dorm room window. No word yet on whether that song has held up over time. In any case I thought it interesting to note how much of this song is “recycled”, and how appropriately that fits with the general theme of wisdom passed down.
This cut is pretty raw, with only very basic instrumentation. I’m trying to block out where I want the different parts to go. The best part of the song, I think, will be when I get Nando and Morgan to sing backup. In my eyes, they really make the song.
So this song has been around in one incarnation or another for a few years, but last summer I spent some time with it and sculpted it into a complete piece. I have several old demos to choose from (mostly just me playing the same chords over and over while experimenting with different lyrics) but this take is pretty much as I wanted the completed song to be.
“Old timers” on this site will recall that I posted a nearly-complete version of this song a few months back. I am now reworking that almost-perfect attempt and will have the song polished and complete very soon. Things are chugging along!
The song is coming along, but the path ahead is still frustratingly unclear for me. I am fairly certain that I like all parts of this song, but I am afraid that what I am actually trying to do is combine two separate songs and something about it just isn’t totally working for me. There’s one part, the verses of which all begin with “Have you ever…” and then this other part, which goes “You are never alone, that’s what you say to the empty hallway…”, over some pretty heavy guitars and drums and such. And I like this part, even though I’m not really happy with the singing yet. But all the same there’s something that feels oddly wrong about it somehow, as though you’re watching a movie and someone behind you changes the channels without warning.
So I think I’m going to cut out this hard second part. This includes the solo at the end of the song. Killing off something like this is never an easy task but sometimes you’ve just got to prune, I guess. I’m hoping that, having cut this song down, I will begin to recognize it and the correct version will start to resonate in my head and heart. Sometimes everything just works, like floating on air. But sometimes making a song seems really hard, like trying to swim in a swamp.
This is a song begun several years ago. It’s one of those songs written late at night - almost whisper quiet - when you’re wallowing in some profound understanding that, in daylight, would seem obvious or even trite, but given the moonlight (spilling white through the windows) and your mood (a cocktail of self-obsession and self-pity, perhaps), it seems impossible to ignore. And so the notes come out, and so do the words, and you scribble them down on a torn piece of paper that you shove into the back pages of a notebook, which then goes and hides on a shelf as you crawl, finally, to bed.
In time you open the notebook for something else entirely and by accident discover the song again. If you’re lucky it’s aged like a good wine and settled into itself; if you’re not it’s like something out of a time capsule from the fifties. If you’ve got the time and inclination you can trim off some of the weaker bits, now that you’ve got some distance from the thing, and maybe tighten up that part over there with some better lyrics.
This is how I ended up with this song. I’m working on the arrangements now to try and turn this lonely acoustic thing into a full-on song for the album. Stay with me; it’s coming soon.
