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 hope so.
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.