The middle child

I'd like to have nothing to do 

one of these years when Spring arrives. 

We are always so busy un-Wintering ourselves and preparing for Summer. 

It sucks, Spring. 

What always happens to you sucks. 

The most in-between of the seasons - somehow you seem to get taken for granted. All your effort, and we run around with our buzzing mowers and our dripping brushes. 

We trample the tender shoots, we miss the sleight-of-hand adjustment to the angle of sunlight.

I promise this to you and to me - one of these years I will have nothing to do but enjoy your arrival.

 Occasionally I write down dreams....

(From April 1, 2018 - copied 'verbatim' from a pencil entry on a page in a notebook.)

Had a long dream last night

John Cooke had a bar/restaurant - I was having a meal at the bar with my friend Mike McGettigan - meal, appetizer, bottle of wine - the appetizer was something like a little blowfish flambé - looked more like a 'Mrs. Paul's fishstick' to start but the bartender put a little lighter fluid on it and lit it, it puffed up to look like a blowfish - spitting + spluttering - I told someone at the bar that it wasn't like torturing - it was already dead.

I asked for the bill and went out to the parking lot to get my wallet -my vehicle was a large black steam locomotive - went back inside. John was working on my bill - he said "you had a view-and-chew, right?"

The 'view-and-chew' was a clam or oyster appetizer - I said yes - the bill came to $820. I was kind of stunned, figured I'd have to use a credit card.

I asked if it was a really expensive bottle of wine.

...and somewhere over the last few years I've had this habit of saying "Thank you for letting me tell you that".

How many years...

...can a song idea lay in your notebook or in your head before it is born or finally discarded. 

Perhaps none of them ever really get discarded - they just wither and collect dust. I think that if there was something unique and promising in the initial idea it will persist until it is realized. I've thought about it this way: there can be a phrase or a group of words that catch your attention - they catch the light in a certain way that makes you look at them, give them consideration, tuck them away.
At least that's how it starts for me - I'm essentially more of a word person than a music person. 

We revisit the idea from time to time because we can't just dismiss it. I've been revisiting a particular song idea on and off for seventeen years - I can connect a specific incident to the spark that created the idea for the song. The incident was the controversy that flared up when Natalie Manes of the Dixie Chicks made a remark at a concert in England about being '...ashamed that the President (GW Bush) was from Texas'.

The backlash against the artists caught my attention and the song idea was born one day as I worked in the yard, raking or cutting grass. The radio on the back porch was tuned to a country station. When I was close enough to hear it I followed along to the melody and chord changes. When the task took me away from the porch - out of hearing range - I continued to 'hear' the song but was supplying my own lyrics to the melody and rhythm that the song on the radio had established. 

Seventeen years ago was before I had begun to consider myself a 'songwriter'. Not even sure if I was keeping notebooks at the time so if the idea persisted for a while it was purely on the strength that I thought might lay in the seed. Presently there are half a dozen or so notebooks lying around and some effort to work on that song can probably be found in a few of them.

I've thought about why this idea gets revisited - my conclusion is that I feel that at some point my 'chops' will improve to the point where I can do what I consider 'justice' to the original idea.

All the little moving parts that make a song - the words, rhyme scheme, melody, rhythm - there are endless ways to get it wrong and just a few to get it right. 

I found myself awake in the middle of the night recently, looking for something to occupy my mind while waiting to fall back asleep. I ended up trying to get some more lyric ideas together. I've felt that this song needed at least another verse or two and maybe a chorus or bridge. To my untrained way of approaching songwriting, I feel I have to have a bunch of parts lying around to see how they might be fitted together. Sometimes that tells you what to discard, what works and what doesn't. 

I won't even know what a chorus or bridge could be until I start trying to assemble the parts.

Just today I was picking the chords of the song on the guitar and made what I think is an improvement - adding a D note on the B string to a G7 chord (the IV). While it is still called a G7 it gave the chord a fuller sound and carried the same D that is in the D minor chord (the I).