I am forty acres

Or 20, or 10 or 15

and at the end of every day

I plow me under.

Alcohol runs the plow,

a couple of beers and half a bottle of wine.

I am overrun.

I will rise like a bean sprout tomorrow morning

- sleep-step to the coffee maker.

And be the field where the fruits of my labor

grow.

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).

Scrolling through old posts in my 'offline journal' I came across this.

One more attempt to sort-or-understand it all.

2/11/12

There was a magazine next to the crapper, of course.

So 

Sometimes after wine, maybe a little too much wine

you will read something. And what had previously escaped your

razor sharp intellect®

is now blazingly, blindingly clear.

The former Poet Laureate whose book on poetry

you’ve labored over

has a poem published in a magazine (which you have fortunately stored next to the crapper)

and every word - instead of being rectangular and indigestible

now actually describes an individual leaf on this 

tree

of life.

The poem - it’s about mules and old sayings and getting kicked and breathing. Indeed, what else is there?

This too-much-wine evening also happens to be 

the same day as your visit to a church

for a funeral of the mother of a friend.

This church - as it happens - is the same church which for at least a decade in your life was the only reason that you tied shoes onto your feet on one morning each week from mid-June to the end of August.

This church from your past, this moment in your present, 

your questions about the hereafter

all condensing, crystalizing right here in this too-much-wine evening.

So today I tied presentable shoes to my feet, tied a tie around the collar of 

a presentable shirt and went to the old church and listened to the priest speak.

It’s a moment. 

There in the church - the flood of thoughts - how many funerals in this country each day?  How many people utter words meant to sum something up? 

This - today - is about the moment when whatever it is 

that the universe has - or is - separates itself (it would seem) from 

a speck - a prism - that focussed the energy of the universe into an identifiable form for eighty-odd years. 

So

All of these beams align today - shoes, energy, wine, poetry - and I feel as though I flail and flop like a throw rug in the dryer. 

A throw rug walked on by saints and soaked in spilled wine.

Religion. Who’s yer daddy? Jesus? Buddha? Mo-freakin’-hammed?

Raised with Latin phrases 

echoing through my brain,

today  I realized that what we all want - no matter whose picture is hanging on the wall - 

is just something that we can all put our hands on at the same time

and look each other in the eye

and say, “Yes - this is something we agree on”.

The darkness is so vast . . . . 

To focus.

And then there’s this...

now that you’re a grown-up you know about all the things that get in the way - the things that take you away

away from the home and the faces

but when you were a pup, you knew nothing of that

your Dad was there or he wasn’t - and when he was there

he was smiling or he wasn’t - you were a pup; you didn’t know

but when he smiled and tickled you and called you by the nickname he had for you

that was all you needed

Steady, my hand - hold the lens still.

All this way to come - to be here and focus.

Hold the lens still.

There’s this pile of wood, there’s all these parts

these things you’ve picked up along the way

all of it here with you now

yours to make something out of

to show that you’ve paid attention

(to show?) that you know if an edge should be soft or sharp

if a word should be warm or cold

The Notebooks

I went out and bought two or three of these notebooks - probably just before my 59th birthday.

I used to write in “journals” off and on for years - somewhere out there in the barn/workshop there’s a box full of those hard-bound-book type things. Some fancy, some plain. I guess they appealed to a part of me that thought writing stuff down needed to look serious. Most of them aren’t even 1/4 full.

Around eight years ago I fell in with a group of local musicians - some were songwriters, some singers and players. I have always loved music - there was a grand piano in our living room when I was a kid. My two older sisters got piano lessons that they did not like - I did not get the lessons but my mother used to say that I made musical-sounding things on that piano.

I bought my first guitar at 13 - I was enthralled with the 60’s Folk scene.

Anyway - the notebooks. I have been earning a living doing carpentry for about forty years now. At this point I don’t have to think real hard to get the work done. I also work alone often and the internal dialogue just runs on and on. When I got a computer I naturally started keeping little online notebooks. Falling back into music via the friends that I had found, I began to channel my internal dialogues into paper notes during the day. Scribblings that I was hoping were song-like ideas. I began to amass pockets full of scrap paper. I wrote on the backs of receipts, my appointment books - that kind of thing. So that day came when I went to Office Depot in Rio Grande and bought a couple of black & white composition books - and one orange one on a whim. I intended to proceed in an orderly fashion and work in one until it was filled up before starting in the next one. That probably didn’t last very long. Being lazy by nature I would eventually just grab whichever one was nearby and so at this point the chronology of the scribblings is totally out of whack. 

I think I also liked the idea that buying those notebooks seemed to indicate the serious intent that I had bent myself to. So I bought more before any were filled up. 

I page back through them from time to time - I see the same ideas presented and re-presented. It has led me to think that there are a half-dozen or so issues that concern most of us. I’m often surprised to see how long ago an idea that I think of as recent was initially written down.

There might be five or six currently working - I think there are two that are filled. The orange one is faded to a pale ochre.

I managed to lose track of one a couple of years ago. Actually, I didn’t lose track of it - I lost it.

I dropped it in the driveway of The Mad Batter Bar & Restaurant during one of the SS Cape May conferences. I didn’t even miss it. One night last year I was at The Batter to hear Dan Barry play. His bass player Dominic Mancini came up to me and handed me the notebook that he’d found back then. I didn’t recognize it at first when he handed me that notebook - then I saw the black “3” on the cover. Apparently I had numbered them once before the scheme got out of whack. As I said, I see the same themes coming up over and over, but sometimes in between all the negligible scrawls there are a few keepers.

Songwriting on the brain...

Looking back through the (online) notebook and found this - from August 14 in 2011...

8/14 Been reading Paul Zollo’s “Songwriters on Songwriting” - he interviewed a whole bunch of writers for the book, each chapter is an interview. Trying to be good, not jump around, read from front to back. Right now, Frank Zappa. He had a pretty pessimistic attitude about the state of songwriting in the middle of American culture. All commercial, all about getting sold and/or made into a video. All about consumption, like fast food.

All of the writers interviewed so far have had interesting things to say - different approaches with a lot of common threads.

But here I am, with this Sunday morning off - seems like there’s so much to do and not enough time to do it. Songs that I’ve been working on that need more lyrics - need to write a good bridge for one - and here I am, learning as I go along. Happy to be doing this, but a little frustrated that I’m not further along - frustrated that I don’t have as much time to devote to it as I’d like.

The next chapter after Zappa is Leonard Cohen. He says something about how even many people with jobs are unemployed - I take this to mean the sort of thing that I’ve come to find in my life - what I’ve been telling people lately - the carpentry work that I do every day, that I’ve been doing for about 35 years now, doesn’t really require more than 10 to 20% of my brain. So the brain starts off on it’s own little game - it’s own quest to amuse itself - and I start putting words together. 

Cohen meant that there are people who remain unfulfilled and underutilized, I think, but the part that resonated with me is how I’m dealing with that (my) underutilization as the day goes along.

Is it because we’re terrified of the truly random nature of the universe that we keep creating these little structures?

Doesn’t matter if you have the radar on, the rain could still walk around you at the last minute.

The eggs, the toast, the Holy Ghost. Which one gets you through the day? There’s no right answer, the life you’re living is your own. There are bugs on bugs and gods on gods.

...and then there's the other part of songwriting, of course - the music part. 

Here's a melody with no words from May 11, 2014...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDLklN9e16o#t=60

Who shot the blog?

I guess it was Facebook. For a lot of us the blog was just a way to get some thoughts and pictures shared. Then Facebook came along and made it easier. Not better, necessarily, but made it into a more commonplace thing. You used to have to work a little harder - maybe even understand a little bit of HTML.
I haven't posted anything to this blog in more than two years - almost three, actually. That in itself is maybe due to how things seem to speed up as we get older. Summer seems to last maybe a month-and-a-half - that kind of thing. But the ease of posting/sharing/revealing in the Facebook era has also been a factor, I believe. In order to include any hypertext or links I'll have to go back to some old posts where I can view the codes used. Do we necessarily have to regret the changing of our tools and methods? I certainly cuss with impatience when I've got to use a manual screwdriver these days (usually when I'm too lazy to go out to the truck to get the powered version). Easier is better?

Cape May Songwriting Workshop - Sept. 13-16 2016

First of its kind - Cape May Songwriting Workshop

The Carroll Villa Hotel and Mad Batter Restaurant will host the first Cape May Songwriting Workshop - September 13 - 16, 2016.  The featured workshop leader will be Freebo, a California based singer-songwriter and a veteran touring and recording musician. 

The first of its kind in Cape May - a three day songwriting workshop at the Carroll Villa Hotel / Mad Batter Restaurant in the heart of historic Cape May. 

The workshop begins on Tuesday Sept 13 with a welcoming ceremony, dinner and a concert by Freebo. Wednesday and Thursday are workshop days (lunch provided) and the event wraps up on Friday with a presentation and closing ceremony.

Freebo is a genuine folk, rock and blues icon who, after over 40 years of recording and touring with many of the great artists of our time (Bonnie Raitt 10 years, Crosby Stills & Nash, Maria Muldaur, John Mayall, Ringo Starr, Dr. John, Neil Young, & many more) is regarded as one of the most gifted singer-songwriters of today. A multi award winner and finalist in numerous songwriting contests, Freebo was also recognized as the 'Best Folk Artist 2007' by the Los Angeles Music Awards. In addition, he has appeared on Saturday Night Live, The Muppet Show, The Midnight Special, and in concert with the legendary Spinal Tap. “...the opportunity to have Freebo in Cape May is a major coup for the Singer-Songwriter community” said Michael Murphy, the program’s organizer.

Cape May has earned a much deserved reputation as a music town thanks to our long running jazz festivals, classical music festivals and the annual Singer-Songwriter conference, as well as our wonderful array of home grown talent nightly gracing gorgeous historic venues. This September marks the first workshop for songwriters and aspiring songwriters who want to immerse themselves in music and instruction just steps from award winning beaches and restaurants amid spectacular architecture at what is largely considered the very best time of year here.

Cost of the workshop, reception dinner and lunches is $450 for the three day event. You can register and pay by Visa and MasterCard by calling The Carroll Villa Hotel at 609-884-5970. Information is available on the CMSW Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Cape-May-Songwriting-Workshop-363749050415907/

Those interested should contact the host, MQ Murphy by email at mqmurphy@gmail.com

(MQM Photo)

7/15 Grocery list love song 

Chicken thighs, broken hearts 

artichoke hearts, living apart 

dozen eggs, way too much 

been there 

why are these beets sold in a bunch, one or two would probably 

do

(MQM photo)

Arrggh! Good ol' Google has changed the layout/interface since the last time I was here - I will adjust (I'm from New Jersey).

Went up to Vineland last night to hear Shawn Colvin at the Landis Theatre. 

El and I and Deb and JM.

You take it for granted sometimes, but it’s a real honor, a gift - when a writer will share their gifts with you. Came home so inspired to get serious about my writing.

This morning (Yay, Sunday mornings/afternoons) I’m looking through my notebooks - finally think I have an idea about how to ‘work’ on my songs.

I'm going to pick a few - half dozen of the bunches of possibles from the books, maybe some of the ones that've been nagging me for attention for a long time.

I'm actually kind of glad to find things scribbled down in the books that surprise me - stuff I'd forgotten about. Feel a little like a cook who might finally feel like there are enough raw materials in the pantry to make something that might taste good and be interesting.

Learning

(MQ Murphy image)

So - I guess I was wondering whether performing songs would help me with songwriting. I think it has. There is a component to the good song - singability. I was just listening to a few songs on the International Songwriting Competition website. There was at least one that I started humming along with about halfway through. The songs were on a page of past winners in the various categories - I was listening to the 'folk' and 'singer-songwriter' categories, of course, though I also listened to a jazz vocal composition from a woman in Ireland.

I've been 'playing out' a lot this year - usually two to three nights a week at the Pilot House and I've also been hosting an Open Mic at The Mad Batter on Sunday nights. Playing more often has improved my guitar playing and given me opportunities to try different approaches to phrasing with my songs.

One thing that I'm not sure I know how to do yet is 'work' on songs. I keep my notebooks with me almost all the time and write things down in them just about every day. It seems that I'm usually waiting for some idea to reach a critical mass where it sort of finishes itself - the results are . . . mixed.

I've got a few tunes that I guess I consider finished, but they feel to me as though I was forcing them to conclusions just to have something finished. That's accurate, because I pushed some of them along in the time between being accepted to perform at Singer-Songwriter Cape May and the date of the actual performances. Just a side note here - I'm remembering that my friend George Mesterhazy was there at the real 'first' performance at the Pilot House - it put me much more at ease to have him sitting at a front table. His comments afterward were so encouraging.

I should also say that I've got a few that I consider finished and pretty good. I get good reactions to 'Driver Has No Money' and 'Country Song'. I've been asked who did the 'original version' of Driver and several people have asked me if it was available on CD. A guy who was an editor at Time Magazine and currently writes a blog for Huffington Post complimented a performance of 'Country Song' and offered to forward it to a producer friend in Nashville. At this point I want just one quiet morning or evening to record basic versions of the better songs for official copyright submission.

Essential equipment.

Six weeks ago today I got careless while using the table saw for a project. For reasons not clear to me right now I ended up putting my left index finger into the saw blade.
The first thought in my mind was 'oh, no - guitar fingers!' . . .

Carbide-tipped saw blades can deal with much harder materials than flesh and bone - the blade didn't hesitate for a second to alter what I offered it. My injury could have been much worse - looking at the blade path tells me that another 3/8" would have meant that I was carrying the fingertip with me to the ER. As it was, the Doctor put about 12 stitches from the front, over the tip and down the other side to pull it back together. Well numbed, I didn't feel it when he put the stitches right through the fingernail. Funny to look at it now and see those little holes in the nail.

The stitches were taken out 12 days later - the healing process is going well. Somehow my body is pretty good about healing, especially my hands. I had done something similar - worse, actually - about 26 years before when working on another table saw. That accident shredded the tips of the middle and ring fingers on the left hand and they ended up about 1/4" shorter than they had been.
(I started a song a while back about the abuse suffered by the left hand of a right-handed carpenter)
Back then I was more actively pursuing the side career of pottery - it was my major in college and I had made various attempts to make a living by it. I think that working clay with the fingers as they healed had a positive effect on the whole process. It seemed to me that connecting the mind with the fingers in order to create something made the healing a more organic process - a less passive process. Actually, I've never tried to put it into words and so I'm finding it a bit awkward to describe what I thought I was doing . . .

I thought of that today as I went out to an old plastic tub behind the barn and dug out a small fistful of stoneware clay. It is a tub of scrap clay that has been sitting there with the lid blown off, just weathering for twenty years or more. The kind of clay you'd kill for if you were making some pots - it'll be really plastic from sitting so long. I've been thinking for the last few weeks that I should make clay-working part of the healing process for this injury, too. Shape and flesh-wise, the finger looks like it will be fine for guitar playing. The sensation in it is a mess right now - a weird combination of numbness and over-sensitivity. I know I've got six months until the fingernail is back to normal, but just watching the body go through the healing process is pretty amazing.

I was thinking recently, they say Eskimos have a hundred different words for snow - I should have two hundred words for luck.

Worthless Man

3/02/12 Early, like 1:37 AM

Been working on Worthless Man - trying to make it not suck. It is a ponderous downer of a song, so it seems the latest thing that I’m trying with it is to do it way uptempo. I’m liking this so far, but I’ve been liking what I did to it until I didn’t like it anymore. The chord changes are falling together in a way that I’m happier with. Two verses, a bridge, an instrumental verse (c’mon, Tom Naglee!) and two last verses. Liking the shape of it for now, hoping to do it tomorrow at PHOMN.

Sometimes a lifetime just ain't enough

(photo by Patti Goyette)

Samuel Johnson said something about imminent death having the effect of focussing the mind. It can have the same effect on those only peripherally affected by death.

To get right to the point, I write very regularly in a songwriting notebook.

If you were to page through the book you'd see bits of phrase, brief thoughts - usually on a given day nothing more than a couple of lines.

This week, on Monday, I got the news of the death of a friend by his own hand. So - this week there are six pages of scribbles and revisions on the subject of his passing . . .


I didn't ask what method he chose
It wasn't important for me to know
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one staying here
We're the ones moving on

Everywhere I looked this week I saw trucks pulled up side by side
They were talking through the open windows
Talking about the one who died
They found out on Sunday
The carpenter's day of rest
Found him lying on a bed
With a pistol on his chest

I didn't know what method he chose
It wasn't important for me to know
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one staying here
We're the ones moving on

This Thursday won't be a workday
You'll leave the Carhartt's on the floor
You'll put on a jacket and tie
And head on out the door
Stand around down at Spilker's
Til you just can't stand any more

Trying to get it right, well that can take a lifetime
And sometimes a lifetime just ain't enough
It's not the bad weather, the short money or the sore muscles
It's the being alone that can be so . . . tough.

I didn't know what method he chose
If it left a hole, well it didn't show
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one in the box
We're the ones looking on
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one staying here
We're the ones moving on

.

So, how's that 'songwriting' thing going?

Well - got some notes here from an evening more than a year ago, and some news . . . first, the old notes:


11/04/10
Hooted last night at The Merion with Deb, Mike Kearns, Glenn, Barry T, Barry and Elaine, George and Vickie. Seriously enjoyed myself despite throwing numerous clams. I sang "Killing the Blues" earnestly and artlessly. That's my net assessment as of early this morning. I'm finding out more about what it takes to perform music. Whether or not I ultimately think of myself as a performer, it is still important for me to learn this.
I've hung with Gordon a little and talked to Geo M about recording - told both Gordon and George that my current goal is to be able to produce a demo of three or four songs this year in time to submit it for application to SSCM '11.
My current assessment of my strengths/weaknesses is as follows: I have a nice, if not particularly interesting, voice. My guitar playing skills are fair within a rather narrow comfort range. My knowledge of music is scant, but I'm working on that (in a slacker manner).
I think that my most exploitable skill lies in lyric writing. There seems to be a part of my brain that runs all day long on a kind of side rail, simultaneously with the 'getting-work-done' part of the brain. I've been writing more things down in the past year with the explicit intention that they might be song lyrics. In other words, some degree of rhyming, a few themes, an effort to make these little things arc over a few minutes and make some kind of point - a profound point would be great, any old kind of point is acceptable and of course preferable to pointlessness. Okay?

Soooo . . . I've kept at it, actually finished a few songs last year. I decided not to apply for SSCM in 2011 - a couple of songwriters that I knew were applying and I felt (rightly) that I was nowhere near ready. They had plenty of material, and they had been working at the craft for years. I felt that somehow it would be disrespectful to elbow my way into that scene. That, and the fact that I need a deadline to make me get things done. I guess I never really resolved to get the material together in time.

A year isn't all that long these days - it flew by and I did resolve to apply this year - which meant having some kind of recorded versions of some tunes. In the last month or so I joined the Songwriter's Guild of America and registered with BMI. I applied to SSCM 2012 last week and was accepted - which means that I'm going to have to finish about 8 of my unfinished tunes if I'm going to have enough material to do a 30 minute set. Yikes!

9/11/11

Ten years ago today I was working less than a mile from home. That bright September morning I was nailing shingles on the roof of a little barn that I’d just built for a customer. I guess I must have gotten a phone call from my wife, telling me what was happening.

There’s coverage of the memorial services on the radio and television this morning. I listened to a little of it - the clock radio was on when I woke up.

Just now I was out in my front yard mowing the lawn. A fire truck from the next town drove by - the firemen were wearing their dress uniforms, not their helmets and coats. A minute later another truck drove by and I thought, “Oh, of course - a memorial service.”

I went back to mowing and something across the road caught my eye. I thought it was a trash bag blown along by traffic - then I saw a uniformed fireman walking along the road and I realized that the object had fallen off the truck. When he picked it up I saw that it was a fireman’s helmet. I stood by the lawn mower and watched as the fireman walked back to the truck that had pulled over just a little way down the road. I didn’t know him, but I realized he looked familiar. I’d probably seen him in the supermarket or the convenience store.
I watched him walk by, waiting for him to look across the road. I knew what I wanted to do - he was past the house and a little ways further down the road when he looked behind him and across the road. When he looked at me I saluted him - he nodded in response. I went back to cutting the lawn and thinking about those hundreds of people who ran into those buildings ten years ago to do their jobs.

Max, the neighbor's dog

10/17

Neighbor's dog was killed in the road this morning. I've been doing the calculations of poetry in my head for the last hour - trying to find the voice of the dog.

A beautiful dog - aren't they all? A big brindle boxer-pit mix with blue eyes. Lying there in the road, an indictment of us all. I can see him right now - hours later - it would have been too cruel to take his picture lying there, but I'd like you to see him . . .

"Who made you the boss of me? All you had to do was keep me out of the road . . .

"I can't get up, there's no running from this -

so I'm lying here in the shit and the piss . . . who's licking tears off my face?

Now that lady driver is sad, and you're sad, and I've got this serious pain in my side . . . "

Working on Songs

(MQMurphy photo)

Yes, that's right - since I have no plan for how to support myself when I can no longer carry heavy ladders, tools and lumber - I've decided that my salvation will be songwriting. You can help by sending your money in NOW to MQMurphy at P.O. Box 484 Cape May, NJ 08204.

Here's some raw (very raw) material from which I'll be trying to fashion a hummable ditty that'll become a radio favorite. There are other tunes, actually - some of them a bit farther along in the fashioning and polishing process - but I thought it might pique your interest to look at a bit of the raw material, so to speak.

So, you throw your bag in the back and you get in the car with your sister. She'll drive, because she likes to. It's four hundred miles, give or take, to that town above Boston where your Dad grew up. His brother, the last boy from that family of eleven kids, has finally moved on to the next phase.

We listen to music and we talk - talk about George's hundredth birthday that we celebrated with him last year. We'll see the cousins - now we're THAT generation, since there's no more of the other one left.

"Did you like the character that guy played on that other show?" What has that go to do with anything? "I don't know I was just wondering . . . passing the time with some idle chat . . .

he played a bad cop - but maybe not a bad guy, just a conflicted guy - stuck in a bad situation - anyway, he died. In the show, he died"

Can I make something out of that? You'd better believe it.

I have to believe it - because there's no Plan B.