Eric Clapton once said that he went through a period in his life where he was
creating his own misfortune, perhaps subconsciously to keep an edge on his
writing and playing. It’s hard to have the blues when you’re
so damn happy.
When looking back at the songs I’ve written and when I’ve written
them, Clapton’s musing seems to have a real ring of truth to it.
When I’m feeling good—money’s not a huge issue, food in the
stomach, family is treating me nice—my songs just can’t help but
be happy. There’s no reason to get down on the world when it’s not
down on you. (Hey. That’s not a bad line for a song!)
When I’m feeling low down—no cash, no food, bill collectors at the door—I can write some pretty grim stuff.
A few years ago, I was pretty low down. It really didn’t matter to me if I lived or died. I didn’t feel like anyone was interested in my life. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t interested in my life. I wrote a set of lyrics that were downright depressing. I called the song “Waiting For The End To Come” and, hoo-boy is it ever depressing! Unfortunately, I didn’t have a tune for it.
As time rolled along, I discovered that life was not as bad as I believed and things got a little better. The song languished in the bowels of my stack of song writing attempts.
In the meantime, I came up with a tune and chord progression that I quite liked. It had a lick I copped from an old Crosby and Nash tune as one of the chords, but after that, I just let the song flow. I couldn’t come up with words for the tune, though. I played the tune a lot, and people always told me that it was a beautiful song. I always thought it needed words to be complete, but nothing seemed to work with it.
Now adjust your wayback machines for 2001. Times were tough again. I had filed bankruptcy, the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. It happened after a landslide of unforeseen circumstances: I bought a house and then suffered a reduction in pay just a week after I moved in; my wife was suffering immensely with fibromyalgia; she was also, as we later found out, suffering with manic depression and was spending wildly, I had been playing in a dead-end club with a dead-end band and was not growing musically. In short, everything sucked.
I was asked to be on a radio show that aired on a local NPR station and needed three of my own songs to play. I pulled one of my first, Fun Day Sunday, out of my stack and decided that I would use it. I wrote it when life was good and I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. Weekends in the mountains were a slice of heaven and I wrote a song about it in about 10 minutes. I decided to do an old blues tune called Hesitation Blues just because I have always liked that song. I have written dozens of other songs, but never been comfortable with them, always feeling that they were too amateurish. I needed a third song. I decided to do something else that I can’t remember and then grabbed a stack of my papers and headed to the studio on the appointed date and time.
Before the show was recorded, I ran through my songs for warm up, including the one I had no words for. Everyone there loved Fun Day Sunday. They asked if I had written more. I said yes and then pride got the better of me. I thought I might pull out some of the other songs and maybe run one past them that could make the show. While shuffling through the stacks of words, I came across “Waiting.” As I picked it up, a light went off in my head. “I wonder how this would sound to the tune with no words?”
I started the song off and, much to my surprise, went from front to back without
stopping. We put it on the show.
I played that song in the club every week for at least two years after that
and it almost never failed that someone would come up and say that was the
most beautiful song they have heard, or someone would request the song.
In the coming days, I plan to put up the names of all the songs I’ve written, and maybe, just maybe, if I feel bold enough, some of the lyrics.
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