Category: Blog

This song also comes from a long while back. It’s about a situation I suspect is fairly common, where someone measures up an idealized version of an individual they’ve spent a couple nights talking to over drinks versus the real relationship they’ve committed to. This is a tip of the hat to a moment like that in my life.

Years later, what’s most interesting to me is the lack of self-reflection in the lyrics. There’s no debate, there’s no wobbling; just an acknowledgment that there was something unique about that person.

It’s a tune I’m close to for another reason…I didn’t write a worthwhile song after this for nearly a year. For whatever reason, this song kicked in a stretch where I just got too musically complex in my songwriting, and I lost the string for a while. I got stuck on this one.

I took off “Payback” this week. Thanks again for listening…

This is a relatively new one, all things considered. There’s not much of a story here, just someone no longer in my life who had a contemptuous relationship with the truth. It was definitely a tooth pull to get the gaslighting to stop (it never did).

I like these sort-of short bursts of emotion in song. This one might work better with instrumentation, but hopefully it holds up OK.

We took off “Burned Bridges” this week.

This song is about a woman who was an artist and bartending at a place a block from where I lived. We met while I was working a good 70-80 hours a week, fighting my way up to lower management about 5 years into my professional life. She took a liking to me, as they say, but she didn’t get what I was doing. The stress, the drive, the intensity—she viewed it all as damaging. Meanwhile, I viewed it all as the only way to feel good about myself. And so we married and lived happily ever after.

Actually, no. She decided she wanted to have nothing to do with it. I have no idea where she is these days, but I suspect she’d look at me today and laugh her ASS off. And, you know…yeah. Checkmate.

We took off “Giving Up” this week. Thanks again for listening.

I don’t think there’s much to say about this one–it’s effectively a declaration song about taking a risk (I’m sure we’ve all been there). This was done in a stretch where I was doing a lot of internal rhymes, and it shows up here with 6 rhyming slots across each two line phrase in the verses. This song probably captured that era of writing the best.

This song also uses the word “chops,” which is almost definitely the only time that word has shown up in any of my songs (it certainly wouldn’t appear in any word cluster of my lyrics, or probably anyone’s lyrics). I still wrestle with it a little.

We took off “You’re the One For Me” this week. Thanks for listening…

This is a relatively old one, written in a year heavily weighted towards piano songs (it ebbs and flows, but the heavy piano years tend to end up with more complex song structures). This one’s about facing up to an inherent weakness at the start of a relationship, one that ultimately isn’t resolved. I had an issue in mind as I wrote it, but I ultimately left it generic as to what it could be (different religions, different point of view on having children, etc).

I relate to a lot of these lyrics at the moment, so I thought it was a good one for this next two weeks.

We took off “Hate in My Heart” this week. Thanks for checking out the site…