Original Songs

I wrote a song when I was 18 or so. Many years later, I extended someone else's song by writing an extra verse to it. I had always thought it would be nice to write songs, and the idea lodged in the back of my mind for a long time in a mental list of ideal things to do. Sometime in January 2007 I was listening to a CD of Lucinda Williams and thinking about the way she makes use of geographical places in many of her songs. Suddenly a voice in my head intervened and told me to stop analyzing other people's songs and write one of my own. I thought about the song I wrote at 18 and conjured up the first two verses. But I could not remember any more, and there was no extant copy. So I wrote a few more verses complete it, and a day or two later I started a song from scratch. Gradually the pace picked up and I was off and running. Now, whenever I have chunks of time during which I have to do something or be somewhere but the demands on my attention are not so intense, I often write a song or two. Long drives are a typical example. The drive from Pennsylvania to Atlanta can yield three or four songs.

Several months after I started writing songs, I read part of a book on songwriting. One piece of advice was to listen to everything, far and wide. That sounds great, but I am simply too busy to do so. If I have any energy, I usually pull out an instrument and start playing. Listening to others is for those times when I can't do much of anything else. I did spend a few months listening to the local country station while driving around town. Some of the songs were impressive indeed. But after a while commercial radio became so tedious I (again) stopped listening.

So the major elements in my mix are old-time ballads, 70s vintage southern rock, some country artists, some folk artists, and my own peculiar mind--all seasoned lightly with some Buddhist-influenced classical Japanese literature.

Here are a few examples. This first example is an early song, probably the 5th or 6th. It was inspired by a music session I attended in a small town in the mountains:

And, in a similar spirit, here is a song in memory of the great old-time fiddler and magnificent person Ralph Blizzard. It explains the circumstances in which I first met him:

The next one got a general start from the opening lines of the late-Heian era classic Hōjōki 方丈記 (Account of my hut). Otherwise, it is all located in the southeastern United States:

In the next case, the title popped into my head one day. It kept banging around in there until finally I sat down and made up a story to go with it:

I occasionally write message songs, but sparingly. Here is one that doesn't sound too preachy:

Here is a song about the joys of youthful encounters and the bittersweet remembrance of them. What ever became of the two folks in the song?

One evening a local songwriter grandiosely declared during a performance that s/he wrote songs "to remember important truths." Hearing these words, I realized that I, too, write songs to remember important truths. Here's one of them:

And there are many more where these came from. Please inquire further if interested.