Tag Archives: songs

A Song

My ears already hear the morning lark.
Listening far beyond my sight I have begun.
So we absorb what we seem to not touch;
it vibrates us, even from a distance –

and fills us, even if we do not know it,
with something live, which, until sensing it,
we never are; the music moves us on
answering our own song…
but what we hear is the breath of the whole world.

After A Walk by Rainer Maria Rilke

8 APR 2014

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Lay down

Lay down your weary tune;
lay down your weary tune.
You’ve been singing it for far too long.
When others faltered, you still held on strong:
never a missed note or phrase gone wrong.
Lay down your weary tune.

Lay down your worried mind;
lay down your worried mind.
All those ideas that still carry you,
lost dreams and wishes that have not come true,
still doing nothing with nothing to do:
lay down your worried mind.

Lay down your troubled heart;
lay down your troubled heart;
You’ve let your flame go out and found the dark,
toasted with gasoline to find a spark,
and in the scheme of things, to leave your mark.
Lay down your troubled heart.

Lay down your weary tune;
lay down your weary tune.
Just find another, something more inspired:
outside the door where things are still not wired.
Leave that old one to quietly retire;
lay down your weary tune.

03 FEB 2013

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Sing Another Song

Sing another song:
don’t make it too long,
make sure it’s nice and strong
so we all can sing along.
Sing another one
when the first one is done;
we’ve only just begun
having fun.

Sing something
that makes us feel all right;
something simple,
nothing too demanding.
Sing it like
you’ve always done before;
when you’re finished,
sing it just once more.

Sing another tune:
play the paid buffoon,
make us laugh and swoon,
we’ll give you the moon.
Sing another verse,
the same as the first;
no need to rehearse,
it can’t get much worse.

Sing us one
to get us through the night;
something sweet
that makes us feel like dancing.
Sing it like
you mean each single word;
sing the ones we like,
the ones we’ve heard.

Sing another song:
sing it loud and strong.
If it’s not too long,
we might sing along.
Sing it once again.
Make it never end,
like your life depends
on making us your friends.

08 DEC 2010

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Slip, Trip, Stumble and Fall

I had it easy, or so I’ve been told:
good luck and fortune to have and to hold
Plenty good lovin’ and good-timin’ friends
Who swore they’d back me up until the end

But all too easy, it slipped right away;
No more tomorrow, and not much today.
Dreams turned to nightmares, and sunshine to rain;
And how it hurts me now to have to explain.

Sometimes you slip, trip, stumble and fall;
Leavin’ you no chance to make sense of it all.
Without a warning, you get that wake up call
And you slip, trip, stumble and fall.

Some kinds of trouble you just can’t outrun;
bad situations when you’re under the gun.
Sometimes a sure thing is riddled with doubt;
no big surprise when the whole bottom drops out

No sense to argue, no reason to cry
No point in sittin’ there wonderin’ why
It’s bound to happen to you, just wait and see
Sooner or later, eventually

Sometimes you slip, trip, stumble and fall;
Leavin’ you no chance to make sense of it all.
Without a warning, you get that wake up call
And you slip, trip, stumble and fall.

29 APR 2009

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What Soundtrack

If you would write the soundtrack to your life,
the background noise for every single hour
– those shining moments when you’re at your best,
as well as when you’re sad and dour –

what music and what songs would fill the space
when even time and motion seem to cease,
stretched far beyond the limit of your ears?
What voice conveys some sense of inner peace?

16 DEC 2008

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Thoughts on Time and Loss

A conversation yesterday prompted me to think about time and loss in a personal way.

Think about it: as a musician, it seems like one is always surrounded by greatness in terms of performances and songs. Upon close examination, you find yourself watching a recent Neil Young concert documentary where he’s playing songs like “I Am A Child,” “Old Man,” or “Down by the River.” You see the Beatles on TV doing some of their great songs, or Paul McCartney in concert within the past few years, and you hear “Yesterday”, “Let It Be” or “Helter Skelter.” Put on Hank Williams record.

What do these artists and songs have in common? Age.

All the Beatles recordings were made before John, Paul and George were 30 years old. Hank Williams, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Ian Curtis, etc., etc. wrote and performed their best (in some cases, only) work in young adulthood. The Rolling Stones were in their prime in their 20s and 30s. Steve Winwood was 15 to 17, for heaven’s sake, in the Spencer Davis Group.

How does this relate to me, you may wonder?

I’ve been writing songs and playing music since I was eight years old. In the 30+ years since then, I’ve written probably 600 complete songs, composed countless additional melodies, and crafted lyrics for hundreds of songs that are still awaiting melodies. Many of these were captured on fragments of paper, journals, napkins, dozens of cassettes, a couple of CDs, and existed in NO OTHER FORM. It’s the rare song, and usually one from within the past 10 or fifteen years, that exists in digital recording form (MP3) or whose lyrics still exist – usually because I posted this information on my journal.

Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, any extant documentation in written or recorded form is lost forever. That means that my musical output that correlates to that of John Lennon, Hank Williams, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan from the ages of 8 to 35 may as well have never existed.

Imagine if John Fogerty, for example, had to start at age 40 writing songs and had never composed “Run Through the Jungle”. Or if Jimmie Rodgers had never written “Blue Yodel #5”.

There were some great songs in my younger days. From a perspective that I don’t have anymore. Because I’m 42, not 18 or 23 or 27. I’ll never fall in love for the first time again. Or a lot of other things for the first time. Or be as politically angry and energetic enough to scream about it. Or have a four octave range, for that matter. And just because you may have never heard those songs, doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth missing, or wondering about.

I suppose it’s the equivalent of having spent 30 years writing a 1,000 page manuscript, never making a copy, and suddenly having only pages 899 through 937. How do you recreate it?

How many great songs does a songwriter have? How many poems? Would W.B. Yeats have the same cultural significance if the only thing he could prove he’d written was “The Wild Swans at Coole” or “The Stolen Child”?

I used to think that my legacy would be the documentation of a life in art – from cradle to grave as a writer, musician, philosopher, bard. But instead, I find myself in a kind of reverse Rimbaud. Arthur, you’ll remember, gave up poetry at 19 to become a businessman, and never wrote another verse. I can only prove I started out at about 28. Elvis died at 42 – the age I am now. Where would he have gone had he lived, without having had those years from 17 to 41 documented and memorialized so thoroughly?

So many words, melodies, pictures, and recordings make up a true artist’s magnum opus.

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve suffered a literal and figurative lobotomy.

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This Morning’s Song

The song I sing this morning is not new.
In fact, its birth predates even my own;
yet in between the phrases, now and then,
it’s me, and not the tune, that you’ll hear groan.

Why is this melody upon my lips
instead of some fresh fragment from the charts,
designed from sentimental, worn cliches
to motivate me and my shopping cart?

Because it has survived, the same as I,
despite the efforts of a younger set
who think of history as just passe,
and find their greatest talent, to forget.

The song I sing this morning, I once sang
as a young boy who’d just begun to dream
that this old world was more than it appeared,
and started peeking in between the seams.

What song will you be singing when we meet?
I hope it’s one where I can sing along;
I’ll share mine with you, if you’d care to try:
in harmony, it’s twice as loud and strong.

11 APR 2006

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