Archive for the Songwriting Category

Song Demo: Good Night

This one was a long time in the making. Last fall, I wrote something resembling the first verse. It had more of a “Pretty Howtown” kind of feel as it was peppered with nonsense words.  A friend from college passed away not long after. He’d spent the last five years battling cancer. I couldn’t look at those words the same way again.

Then I heard a story from a mutual friend about their conversation over Facebook the night before the friend returned to the hospital. Our friend apologized for being tired and needing to go to bed. The mutual friend told him not to worry. “I’ll be here you wake up.” The rest of the lyrics came together after that. It’s the most personal song I’ve penned for End Times, though I believe it makes sense even without these stories.

The lonesome thrush appears courtesy of Walt Whitman.

The chords didn’t come into being so easily. I knew the melody early on, but there’s some tricky harmonization going on intended to keep any section from feeling too relaxed. I still feel like I could improve it, but at some point you have to surrender a song to the band.

As always, the demo is meant for the rest of End Times, so it’s in a key more fit for Lyndsy than me.

Good Night (mp3)

Anyone heavy as a kitten’s head
In the too-cool end of a too-warm day
Makes the fold of rug our sleepy bed
Where stalked we motes of light in play.

Don’t be scared, my friend.
Rest your eyes, my friend.
We’ll be here when you wake.

Anyone solitary as a thrush
In the dab of green between the rows
Of gold bristles our honest bust,
And our true lonesome song we crow.

Think of all we could have sung
With a little a more time, one more trial run.
But gentle, sleep takes all rhymes,
All work equal, all hands and minds:
Anyone takes but any time.

The lights go out, and we go to sleep.
The stars go out, and we go to sleep.
Good night. Good night. Good night…

Don’t be scared, my friend.

The Clouds: We Make the Rain

Another post about a song over on the ETSB site:

Last August we performed at a wedding on a farm in Northeast Indiana. There was a beautiful, positive vibe all night even with a storm passing through midway through our set. So of course we stayed far too late. Zach’s mom’s house was a few miles away, so the four of us drove there to sleep an hour or two before dawn. When we woke, Lyndsy and I had to head back to the farm. I don’t remember what we talked about on the drive, but whatever was said in combination with the night before left me feeling positive and encouraged. On the way back, I began to write “The Clouds”

Read more of “The Clouds: We Make the Rain.”

Writing Geeky Songs without the Novelty

I wrote up a piece on a song over on the End Times blog.

I like clever songs. Silly songs. Novelty songs. I’ve attempted to write many such songs. I believe making someone laugh is one of the most important things you can do in life. But at some point in the last few years, sitting at the piano to pull together a new song began to feel weighty. If we were going to perform it night after night, it felt essential that each song mean something.

Read more of Sound Sound Sound: Writing Geeky Songs without the Novelty

Song Demo: Dear Reader

The title is a reference to Baudelaire (to whom Lyndsy’s dedicated a new song), but the lyrics riff on Wallace Stevens more than anyone (e.g., Of the Surface of Things). In reaction to the love songs and breakup songs that made up the bulk of High Wire Lover, lately I’ve tried to write lyrics that say something. This one is probably the most direct product of that desire, but it’s also about how no song ever says anything of value, even this song itself. The outro was the last thing written, meant to humanize the speaker.

As always, forgive me for trying to sing in an alto’s key. These demos are meant for Lyndsy to practice with.

Dear Reader (mp3)

In song the world is three or four stars,
The moon, a rose, and you.
You, a ghost light of the mind,
Illuminates from here to here the line
Past neighborly dangers of moon and rose
All blue and more blue
Than the deepest sapphire.
So attend these glad liars,
The moon, a rose, and you.

We sing into being words that eat their stems,
Mere will o’ wisps to ring our self-full ends.
The whole of language is for us.
The moon, my love, the moon is for us.

We applaud a magician for the craft
We politely ne’er undo,
And a song for the sleight what makes personal
The moon, a rose, and you.

When you close your eyes as we’re kissing,
Is it me that fulfills your wishing
Or so many heartsick fools who sing
Of a precious, tender, wounded thing.
Love is natural and real,
But a song is a darkened mirror.
So don’t believe a word.
No, don’t believe a word.
Don’t believe a word that I would say to you.

Song Demo: Little Bird

Here’s a song I wrote and quickly recorded for End Times. In the last year I keep finding myself writing songs about language or that use language to address some other topic. Go figure. This one about not having a language at all.

Little Bird (mp3)

All dizzy the afternoon,
A little bird wove symbols
Above the remains of the field.
Now lines, now plummeting rings,
Each to me indecipherable
Save their liberty from the frozen spring.
Who are you? And
Do you know the name of anything?
How can you spin so free
With the weight of such awful ancestry?
For those once living now dust
Through the afternoons that shaped your bones –
Is the beauty of lines enough?