Song for a cause – from my new CD, Siren Song.

Yes, although I’ve been asked by people close to me “Don’t you have enough now?”, I am once again writing a song a day for two weeks.  We are at the end of the first week right now, and though I haven’t yet written today’s song, I feel I’ve earned the right to celebrate a little. So I’m writing this post.

This session was a little unusual for me, but before I tell you why, I want you to have a little background.

I am currently in the “true-believers” category.  I believe songs are scattered around the landscape like meadow flowers, and if you’re paying attention, you may pick as many as you like.  They will not all be perfect.  They will mostly not be radio-ready.  They may not even be recognizable songs even after you tweak them (in which case, you go pick another one).  But there they are.  I discovered this concept, actually, back a few thousand years ago, when I lived in California.  I wanted a new song to sing for a gig.  I told myself I should be able to write a song about anything. I looked around the room, and my photo album was lying on the sofa.  The song was called “A Picture for your Scrapbook”, and even though I never play it anymore, I still think it was a perfectly serviceable song.

Flash forward, and now I’m living in Austin again.  I’d been reading books about alien abductions…..I guess I needed something to make me fearful…..and I fell asleep after reading one particularly disturbing account. Jury’s still out on what I believe about that.  Anyway, when I woke up, in the middle of the night, I had a new song.  There was a mad scramble to find writing implement and paper, but I got most of it down, feeling like Samuel Taylor Coleridge all the while. (Kubla Khan was written when Coleridge woke from a dream.  Someone knocked at the door and interrupted the process. There may have been drugs involved.) The song was “Oh, Hear the Wind”, and I consider it one of my best, though I have no idea where it came from. It has nothing to do with alien abductions, by the way.

I now have seven or eight songs that were born while I was asleep. I perform them all the time.  They always seem magical to me, and I hope other people enjoy them too. I can’t predict when they’ll happen, but I’m eternally grateful to whoever the person is who goes picking meadow flowers in the night.

And that’s how the current 14-days challenge started for me.  Two days before we began, I dreamed two songs in succession.  I woke up, wrote the first one down, went back to sleep and dreamed another.  I saved the scraps of paper they were written on and they were my first and third song.  Here they are. (Usual noise here about how this is a Garage Band recording.  More refined recordings will, no doubt, follow.) Bon appetit!

06-04-13 Hello Love

06-05-13 You On The Corner

Technically, this isn’t a 14-songs-in-14-days tale, though it still has to do with songwriting and with Pat Pattison and all the other usual earmarks.  We have a new 14-day challenge coming up on May 1st, though I won’t really be doing it until June.  I and several others begged off, partly because of the story I’m about to tell.  Also, my new CD will have it’s official release celebration on May 17th – at Joe’s Place, MLK and Chicon, 7 – 9 pm — and I feel like my time would be better spent preparing for that.

However, for at least one other person that declined the next challenge, it’s because Pat and Berklee School of Music offered an online songwriting class for FREE.  My favorite price.  It was though a company called Coursera, and it was very well put together.  And I’m about to tell you all about it and send you the two songs that came out of it.

We have actually already done one 14-day challenge this year, but it was about putting together effective metaphors, and I made it to Day 10, before real life took over.  It was grueling, requiring a lot of thought, and even more time.  I’m sure it was good for me, it was that painful.  Maybe one day I’ll go back and finish the other four days, mostly because it took such effort to get that far.  But I’d rather write songs….

So ….

The class was 6 weeks long, and involved putting to use the ideas that Pat presented in each of several lectures for each week.  For example, the first week was about describing a song idea in a series of boxes, each larger than the one before, and each concluding with the chorus idea in a way that made the chorus pay off bigger each time. It was also about identifying different points of view in examples of popular songs, and then trying them out in one’s own songs.  There were quizzes along the way, to make sure the student was getting the point, and then at the end there was an assignment involving the boxes.

I didn’t particularly care about getting a grade for the course, though later that did become an issue for me. I wanted to do well and get something out of it, after all.  But at the end of the first week, despite several hints that this was the case, I discovered that what I thought was the due date actually was not.  It had actually been the day before.  This happened because on the stated date, Monday, March 11th, the window closed at 9 AM.  9 AM?????  I’m a musician! The only reason I know there’s a 9 AM is because it’s on my clock.  Though not necessarily in bed, I’m usually not functional before 11, and even that’s iffy.  I haven’t been actually awake at 9 AM since I stopped having to take children to school …. a long time ago.

So I missed getting in the first assignment.  We weren’t supposed to write an actual song for it, just outline one in boxes, and just write the chorus and maybe the first verse.  In fact, I had been so intrigued by the idea for this one,  that I had most of the song.  Since I was kinda ticked off that the window closed that early, and since living well is still the best revenge: I went ahead and finished the song.  I ended up using it for the next assignment. There’s a link to it at the bottom of this post.  Recording is quick and dirty.  Garage Band. You know how that goes.

The next few weeks were spent variously on identifying different types of rhymes, and learning to use them in a song.  Pat generously offered to allow us to look on while he put the concepts into practice.  It had boxes, rhyming worksheets, choice of tones, lots of preparatory stuff. At one point, I thought to myself “This is pretty mathematical.” which (from me) is not a compliment…..

But then, he started to actually flesh out the song. Amazing!  Wonderful lyrics that not only suited the idea, but felt exactly the way I believe he intended us to feel.   “This way you don’t ever have to have writer’s block”,  he remarked during one presentation. I thought, “I don’t believe in writer’s block anyway!  I learned during the first 14-day challenge that songs are literally everywhere….oh wait!  The 14-day challenges were Pat’s idea too”.

Now the course is over.  I turned in the last assignment, designed to make the students use all the skills they’ve learned, and evaluated five of my fellow students’ efforts (We had to do this after each assignment.)  I’m waiting to see what five of my cohorts had to say about my efforts.  I know several others of the students personally, and wondered if I’d run into them during the 6 weeks.  Pretty unlikely. There were 65,000 people from all over the world taking this course is what I heard!

The results of the last assignment are also linked below.  (Same caveat about the recording quality.) So I got two new songs out of the 6 weeks.  Not bad.

One Tiny Step

Real

I know. I kinda left you hanging, didn’t I.

Well, here are the rest of my songs from our last 14, and a couple of descriptions of my favorites from the other writers involved in this insanity.

Although I had pretty much resolved to stay home during the holidays, the Universe was not listening when I said so. You know the old saying, “Humans plan and G-d laughs”.  We were going to Los Angeles, it turned out, because my daughter, Raina, and her husband, Jesse, now live there. They have a house in North Hollywood we wanted to see, and Andy had not been to California in a long time, and someone offered me a gig at a nice venue there, and…..etc.  But some of you who know me, or for whom I’ve performed, know that I ran screaming from Los Angeles back at the end of the 80s. And that every once in awhile, I wake sweaty from a nightmare that I had to go back and live there again. Mostly, it had to do with people I encountered there, or anyway, two of them, who convinced me I was in the wrong place.  It’s hard not to believe some people are predatory when they are preying on you.

THE  SCENE OF YOUR CRIME

I’m revisiting the scene of your crime

I guess the universe thinks

It’s been enough time

For me to recover

But I’m not so sure

So I’m revisiting the scene of your crime

 

I’m rehearsing the words I could say

To calm myself down

When I notice my hands shaking

Like “Take a deep breath”

And “You don’t have to be upset”

I’m rehearsing the words I could say.

 

You hurt me in a way

No one’s thought of before

How very creative of you!

That was years ago now

I don’t care any more

I’m sure

I’m pretty sure….

 

That’s why I’m revisiting the scene of your crime

I guess te universe thinks

It’s been enough time

For me to recover

But I’m not so sure

So I’m revisiting the scene of your crime

 

Everything went just fine, and I returned to Austin unscathed.  A funny thing happened on the way home. My friends Linda and David drive down from Minnesota every winter to escape the cold.  As they were reaching Austin, there was a freak snowstorm in West Texas, so they stayed at our house while waiting for the weather to clear. They left our house at almost the same time as we left California, so we met them at Exit 65  on I-10 in West Texas, without either one of us losing any time in our journey! Which would have been impossible without cellphones. We hugged, talked a bit, then they continued west, and we continued east. Dontcha love it?

This next was the result of a very productive day for anything except songwriting:

HALLELUJAH!

Hallelujah my car is washed

Hallelujah my bills are paid

Hallelujah my house is clean

Hallelujah my bed is made

Hallelujah my shopping is done

And the rest has been deferred.

Hallelujah! Best of all,

Hallelujah my pedis are cured.

 

Hallelujah my pianos practiced

Hallelujah my guitar is too

Hallelujah my ivories are tickled

Hallelujah my strings are new

I guess I’m a little ADD

I guess I’m a bit of a nerd

Hallelujah my song is written

Hallelujah my pedis are cured.

 

Not much as songs go, but my chores were done.

The next day, as I was telling someone about Raina and Jesse’s wedding, I realized that the song for that day was already written. By Rob Corddry who was the officiant at their wedding.  Or sorta:

LOVE IS FUN

Physics is hard

And chemistry’s hard

But love is fun, and it’s easy

House cleaning is hard

And mowing the yard

But love is fun, and it’s easy

Either kind of calculus is hard

The perfect pun, a 10K run

But love is fun

And it’s easy.

 

Doing my taxes

Makes me anxious

But love is fun, and it’s easy

Losing weight is hard

Not being late is hard

But love is fun, and it’s easy

Speaking truth to power is hard

Writing these songs, admitting I’m wrong

But love is fun

And it’s easy.

 

People tell you love is hard

You gotta work

(You kinda do.)

They forget to tell you the reward

Love has its perks

And that’s the truth

 

Learning restraint is hard

Learning to paint is hard

But love is fun, and it’s easy

Splitting a log is hard

Bathing the dog is hard

But love is fun, and it’s easy

Learning to drive is hard

Playing a drum, lifting a ton

But love is fun,

And it’s easy.

And finally, I got the song about my Dad that I’ve waited a decade to write:

HERO

My papa was a fly boy

In 1944

He flew his final mission

In the 2nd “war to end all wars”.

But didn’t see his home again

For a year and 2 months more

And there are those who call him a hero

 

They locked him in a prison

Somewhere beside the sea

With the memories of companions

To haunt his dreams

And a photo of his wife         

And the child he’d never seen

And those at home called him a hero

 

The most modern of maachinery

The most primitive act

When he was finally free,

He wended his way back

And he saw what they had done,

And what we did to them

He said, “No….I am no hero.

 

My papa laid his life down

In 2007

A good father, a good men

He gave me goodness to believe in.

And somewhere in the universe

I hope he feels forgiven.

And he knows he is a hero

As far as other writers and their successes this time, the standouts for me were Jean Synodinos (Forgive His Sins – which was good advice for me at exactly the moment I needed it — Winter Grey and The End of the World); Katie Gosnell (among others, a hilarious little ditty called No More Funny Songs Please); Stewart Moser (The sweet story of It’s For You  and a beautiful Biblically-based song called Inner Abraham), Joe Strouse (The Right Lane is the Right Lane For Me). Couldn’t agree more, Joe!

I can’t give you any of theirs, for obvious reasons, but you can have Hero to listen to. This will definitely show up on a CD or EP at some point.

Hero

I guess this is turning into some kind of pattern. Once again, this time, I went into this challenge reluctantly and almost said no.  The thing is …. what if the song I always wanted would have been born during this challenge that I just said “no” to.  I would never know, of course. And maybe the song would be written anyway, which I’d also never know.  But the very idea makes me as reluctant to refuse as I am reluctant to participate.  And the idea of  the reward (the new song), keeps me saying “yes”.

Good thing, too!  There’s been a song I’ve wanted for about two decades that finally got written this time!

We timed this challenge for between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That will probably never happen again, or at least I hope not, because there was simply no time for anything. Not really surprising, given the time of year.  I ended up with only eleven songs, because everything was heating up, we were making travel plans, and a million other things.  It wasn’t that the songs couldn’t be written. They were written. But there was virtually no quiet time in which to record.

Oh, and no time to live-blog it either. Better late than never, right?

So…..

Here are the eleven, as they appeared:

Day 1:  SOMETIMES AROUND MIDNIGHT

My daughter Raina’s wedding had been October 6th, and she and her husband, Jesse, had moved to Los Angeles.  She and I are very close, but I can’t see her without her former, little, self superimposed over her present, grown-up self.  I took a gazillion pictures; I recorded her voice; but that’s not what’s missing.  Sometimes I wake up and miss her little self pretty powerfully.

Sometimes around midnight
I let myself recall
When you wore bows and lace
And little shoes that were so small

Sometimes around midnight
I wander down the hall
And gaze at your diplomas
And awards that line the wall

Child, I miss you.
I miss the little arms around my shoulders
Time has passed and you’ve grown up
And I’ve grown older
I still see you in my dreams
Child I miss you.

And sometimes around the midnight
I see you playin’ with your dolls
And I see you on your bike
Or turning somersaults

Sometimes around midnight
I really want to call
But I know that you’ll be sleeping
And I’d make your dream dissolve

Did we have enough fun?
Did we laugh hard enough?
Did I teach you well?
Did you know how much you were loved?

Child, I miss you.
I miss the little arms around my shoulders
Time has passed and you’ve grown up
And I’ve grown older
I still see you in my dreams
Child I miss you.

You have a life
You are a wife/You have a wife
But child I miss you.

Day 2: FAR BEHIND THE CURVE

…. which I already was, having had no time to record the first one. Now I’ve got two unrecorded songs. Life’s not fair…..

When I wake up in the morning
Before I’ve said a word
The to-do list grows another mile
No matter how fast I go
No matter how hard I work
It just keeps gettin’ later
I’m far behind the curve

On the day that I was born
The first words that I heard
‘You’re late. You missed your due date.
You’re already far behind the curve

G-d put me here
To accomplish certain tasks
I’m so far behind now
My life is gonna have to last
Forever
I will never die.

How did I come to pay this price
How did I come to deserve
To struggle through this kind of life
And be far behind the curve……

Day 3: GYPSY HEART

This one started out as I’m   the one with the gypsy heart, but it was a little too self-important for me.  So I changed it. Much better, I think.

He’s got a gypsy heart
He’s got his walkin’ shoes
He’s got his cruisin’ wheels
He’s got the stay-at-home blues
He’s got a head full of songs
He’s got his old guitar
He calls it travelin’ music
Cuz he’s got a gypsy heart

He’s got a gypsy heart
I’ve got a feather bed
I’d try to make him happy
I’d keep him warm and fed
But I gotta let him go
We’re gonna have to part
Cuz I’ve known his kind before
He’s got a gypsy heart.

Maybe one day he’ll want to settle down.
Maybe one day … but I can’t wait around hopin’

He’s got a gypsy heart
So I got a choice to make
If we can’t travel together
I got my own road to take
I can’t change someone else
I am at least that smart
Tomorrow he’s movin’ on
Cuz he’s got a gypsy heart.
I won’t be goin’ along
He’s got a gypsy heart.

Day 4:  THE SONGS MY BUBBE SANG

Bubbe means grandmother in Yiddish, and I’ve already used this one to open my show of Yiddish songs and stories which I performed in Abilene, Texas.  If you can imagine a more unlikely place to do this show, you’re ahead of me.

My bubbe came here from a foreign land
And sang me songs I’d never heard before
She’d hum them in her kitchen washing pots and pans
And sing them to me softly while she sewed
She sang in words I didn’t understand
And whistled melodies I didn’t know
And that is how I came to hear the songs
The songs my bubbe sang.

As I grew up I saw her less and less
I got my own songs from the radio
I didn’t understand that I was blessed
With a heritage of song centuries old
All I saw was the funny way she dressed
All I heard was the odd way she spoke
But i never did forget the songs
The songs my bubbe sang.

Then I had children of my own
And though I sang to them
I never sang the songs
The ones my bubbe sang.

Till the day I was whistling while I worked
And my youngest said “What’s that melody?”
To my surprise I still knew all the words
Though the meaning was still a mystery.
That is why we decided to relearn them
So she can sing her children of their history
And teach them to appreciate the songs
The songs my bubbe sang

Day 5: ‘SPECIALLY AT CHRISTMAS

I have some pictures to show you for this one. The song explains it all.

It started several years ago
One cedar tree, beside the road
Had ornaments and artificial snow
Mysteriously one day

The next year, there were two or three
Christmas trees for you and me
No one knew how this came to be
But we all liked it that way

Our town is known for whimsy
Our town is known for weirdness
Our town is known for crazy
Our town is blessed
‘Specially at Christmas

If you’re here for the holiday
You’ll see them all along the highway
The grass is brown and the sky is gray
But this is how we celebrate.

Our town is known for whimsy
Our town is known for weirdness
Our town is known for crazy
Our town is blessed
‘Specially at Christmas

I sure love Austin!

 

This is on Capital of Texas Highway (360), and happened just like I told it.

Day 6: A SUK IN MOROCCO

This was inspired by a cooking/travel show on PBS on that evening.  Everything in the marketplace was beautiful. I’ve never wanted to go to Morocco before…..but this made me hungry!

I want to go to a suk in Morocco
And buy multicolored spices
And vegetables that grew up by the sea
And mysterious veiled women
Who cook exotic dishes
I want to have them cook one up for me.

I want to travel to a home in Morocco
By the great Sahara desert
And ride on a camel all the way
And as the sun goes down
And the stars come out
I’d lean back and watch the goats as they play.

I want to visit Marrakesh
Wear Moroccan leather on my feet
And watch the graceful women as they sway gently down the street
But mostly, I just want to eat.

I want to go to a suk in Morocco
And buy multicolored spices
And vegetables that grew up by the sea
And mysterious veiled women
Who cook exotic dishes
Who would cook them up for me.

I’ll have more for you next time.  I don’t want to wear you out.  Here’s the song I’ve chosen for you from this batch. Hungry yet?:

A Suk in Morocco

I just noticed that I offered you, dear readers, the same song twice in a row. I’m about to remedy that, so you can stop being annoyed with me, and enjoy the two songs I’m sending this time.

There are often days during each challenge when I optimistically sit down to produce “today’s masterpiece”, and nothing comes out.  I’m currently suffering from upper respiratory distress caused by allergies, and wishing there was such a thing as a roto-rooter for my chest. Maybe then I could get at the air I know is trying to flow in and out. Well, the song is trying to flow out, but there’s too much junk in the way. For one thing, the dishes need washing, the shades need to be pulled up or down, the world needs to be fixed and myriad other tasks that interfere with the easy production of a song.

Every time I have faced the challenge with nothing in hand, though, something catches my ear, sometimes at the last possible minute, and the song is born.  Two pretty remarkable instances come immediately to mind.

The first one is from the Second Challenge, which occurred in July of 2010. On one of the evenings, I looked into my magic pockets, and found … well …. pocket lint. Nothing much of interest. A song about pocket lint would be permissible, of course. We are permitted to write crap. In fact, we are expected to write crap. As Pat Pattison says in all his classes, crap is aka fertilizer.  Note: In my humble opinion, however, my crap is not fertilizer, it is simply crap. End of note.

But, because I believe songs are everywhere, I started looking around the room to see if I could figure out where today’s song was hiding. Bookshelf? No. I didn’t feel literary. CD collection? (See how old-fashioned I am?) No. I’d be too tempted to copy some favorite song. Hmmmm….. What’s on my bulletin board? Oh. A bill that needs to be paid right now! AKA, a distraction. Take it down, pay it, get back to work. Dang it! There’s a plaster cast of my daughter’s hand when she was 5, and her first baby clothes in a showcase, and a picture of her in the bluebonnets when we returned to Austin from Los Angeles ….  Good material, but I’m not feeling it right now.

Suddenly my eye falls on my Kit Kat clock. I had coveted this kind of clock since I was a small child. One of my friend’s moms had one, black with white eyes, white numerals and a white bowtie. I loved the way its eyes went back and forth with its tail. My aunt had one in her kitchen. Hers was pink with rhinestones, which I thought was a little much, but I would have taken it, if she’d offered it to me.

When we first came back to Austin, I met a man who was so kind to me, and I tried as hard as I could to fall in love with him, but I couldn’t do it. (And all that was short-circuited when I met Andy and fell gaga in love with him.) But in the beginning of my friendship with this kind, sweet person, he gave me a KitKat clock for my birthday. After I realized it was no go with falling in love with him, and told him, I asked him if he wanted the clock back (hoping he didn’t). He said no, he thought I should have it. There wasn’t anyone else he could think of that would be as excited about it as I was.

Well, my clock was broken. It had leapt off the wall one afternoon, and when I picked it up, both hands were pointing at the 6. I’d explored its innards, and figured out how to make the eyes and tail move again, but I couldn’t make the hands do anything but hang there.  And that had been the case for a few weeks now. I got to thinking about time, and how we use it to organize our day, and straight-jacket ourselves within its confines. I don’t tell time. Time tells me. (That made it into the song, by the way.) I wished this was the only clock I had, so that I could pretend I had all the time in the world. That’s the song. “Hands of my Clock” is at the bottom of this post.

And then, in the third challenge….

This is in January 2011, and once again, I’m settling into the days effort, but this time I let the distractions happen. I can’t remember now what I was looking for, but I suddenly decided I needed to look for it RIGHT NOW, and toddled off, leaving the blank page behind. I have two in-box kind of desk accessory, except they’re under my desk, and I decided that was a likely place for whatever-it-was, and was suddenly brought up short by the discovery of the many letters from my Dad, who died in 2007 at the age of 92.  On one of the envelopes is a note to the mailman about how he is delivering this letter to the next great singer/songwriter star. There is lots of financial advice, little notes written on the backs of shopping lists, clippings from newspapers about Austin.  My Dad was a World War II veteran, who was shot down over France, and spent the remainder of the war in a German POW camp (while my sister was being born in Ohio), was liberated by Russian soldiers and pretty much walked back to Allied forces. He was a great parent, and to this day, each of his daughters believes she was his favorite. A very special man.

Well, I found his letters, and my heart thudded once in my chest, and then I started to read them, and there were tears, yes, but there were also smiles and even giggles, and then there was a song.  I’m pleased to report that the last three notes are D-A-D. It’s down below too.

The Hands on my Clock

My Dad