Adam Cole - The Piano Teacher You Wish You'd Had the First Time

I find AI very useful. when you ask it the right questions. But by being polite to it, I may be going over the deep end. Here’s why I think it matters.
https://adam108.substack.com/p/why-i-chose-to-be-polite-to-ai?r=8spd4

You have to understand, I’ve been at this for thirty years. Writing songs for my wife, I mean. I started before we were married.

There are probably 20 of them at this point. She liked them, usually. Occasionally she didn’t, and that was the worst.

One day she told me, “Those aren’t songs about me. They’re songs about your feelings.”

That was a hard one. I struggled with it. Then, last Thanksgiving, I decided to take the challenge.

I had the week off, and I spent a lot of it working on a real song about her. I didn’t stop after I’d written one. No patting myself on the back this time.

Each time I asked myself, “Is it good enough?”

The first one was fun, and the second one sweet. The third was kind of funny. But none of them had what it took, in my opinion.

So I tried again.

This is the last one I wrote, maybe the last one I’ll ever write, because she cried when I played it for her.

Sara Bareilles made me want to get out of here. https://open.substack.com/pub/adam108/p/sara-bareilles-made-me-want-to-get?r=8spd4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Some songs come fast. Some songs come slow. And some songs come and go.

“Too Many Angels” is in that little cache of creative projects that “just weren’t right” the first time, or the second, or the third. Along with Motherless Child, a novel which took 17 years to get right, this little ditty went through four or five versions over a number of years before I called it done. You may be interested in knowing why I’d bother.

https://adam108.substack.com/p/do-you-know-why-your-song-isnt-a

“Crossing Over the 17th Street Bridge”

https://adam108.substack.com/p/i-wud-wolk-faev-han-dred-maeels

I need you!

https://open.substack.com/pub/adam108/p/hee-haw?r=8spd4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

https://substack.com/@adamthelearningcoach/note/c-276456421?r=8spd4&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

https://open.substack.com/pub/adam108/p/my-undecided-lover?r=8spd4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

This was another song I co-wrote with Bradley Cole Smith. Like Pros and Cons, this tune started out as a 45 second instrumental clip meant for a Jimmy Carter Documentary. I took it, glued it onto itself several times, and wrote a song on it.

I tend to write first and ask questions later. If my words don’t make sense to me now, they usually mean a lot to me in a couple of years. So what does it mean that it’s “Hard to be loved?”

Carson McCullers wrote in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe that most of us would rather love than be loved. As someone who has loved much more than he has been loved (in a romantic way, I mean) I understand this sentiment at too deep a level. This song may have come from that place of longing.

It’s an attempt to suggest that maybe it’s not such a bad thing to receive love, even if it’s hard to do so. That puts a sweeter spin on my song than the McCullers book. It’s a very special unrequited love song.

https://youtu.be/vMGjfnMEmo4