The best song I ever wrote my wife 

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.

Do you know why your song isn't a hit? 

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

It's So Hard To Be Loved 

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

I Feel Like Making A Mistake 

When I was the keyboardist in The Front Porch Session Players the bass player and I had this running gag. He’d say some nonsequitur and suggest it should be a song, and I’d write the song.

That’s how “Orlando Morning” got written. If it had a strange title, I was going to find a way to make it a song. And I always did.

One day our drummer came in and told us he hadn’t been able to sleep because he’d had fleas in his eyes. I thought that sounded like the best name for a song ever. Some kind of a Shawn Mullins thing…I could HEAR the melody.

So I wrote it. (And my drummer hated it.)

Little did I know, “Fleas In His Eyes,” like so many of my other automatic writing songs, would end up pointing a bony finger right at me, reminding me of shortcomings I didn’t want to face. I thought I was writing a song, but I was trying to get through to myself.

“I feel like making a mistake…” “I think I’ll sabotage myself.” “I think I’ll throw it all away.”

As I listened to the words of the demo recording, I heard myself admitting that I am very good at self-sabotage, that I romanticize it, that I see my failings as somehow noble.

But they’re not. In fact, they’re mostly avoidable. I just have to stop thinking of myself as Napoleon.

A hard song to listen to. But a really easy song to sing. And my wife, who doesn’t give me a lot of compliments on my songs, really liked the way I sounded on this one.

See what you think.

https://youtu.be/lU1zzluvf0I