I’ve just started working a day job again after several years of not. It’s part-time but it’s every weekday, and this past week was my first full week on the job, so I planned certain pockets of the day for songwriting and hoped for the best. My first songwriting session felt like treading molasses. Several little starts into something that bogged down and went nowhere.

It would have been fine to not come up with a song this week, giving myself extra bandwidth to absorb new responsibilities, but thankfully another session turned up something more promising and then I was able to finish the song in one more session and record it the next day. So that Wednesday night the whole weekly songwriting/recording/posting process (except writing this blog post) was complete!

The tune came first on this one, and my first lyrics turned out to be throwaway but good stepping stones. I was picturing rollicking sailors hoisting beers and saying “never” a lot. Here are some of my actual first draft lyrics:

Oh you never gave in and you never gave out / And you never considered the cost / It was better back then but you never did doubt . . . You were older than the stars / You were dancing with the light . . . You were running with the bulls / You were dancing with the fools . . . Paint a girl on your back and another up front / On your chest for the whole world to see

Yup, lyric writing can be a wild and goofy ride.

Eventually I turned to an older lyric idea I’d never finished, and worked it to fit this tune. That was verse one, and then the #songaweek2022 Week 5 prompt “used to think it was” got me into the second verse. Then some fun with words for the last verse.

You look like a song and you sound like sunshine
You touch me like gentle perfume
You smell like the rain and you fall like fire
You taste like the silvery moon

You are how I know there’s more
than the way I know the world

I used to think it was impossible
To feel this light and free
Then I left second-guessing and never went back
And the rest is history

This is what I know for now
So it’s what I sing about

Run away with me love on the tip of your tongue
Through a trail of residual starlight
It’s an elegant joke, it’s irrelevant smoke
It’s a nursery rhyme crossed with a bar fight

It’s as clear as broken bells
All this nothing much to tell