Last night I turned off the news and played classical music while I made dinner. Sometimes no words, only music, is exactly what I need. This week, #songaweek2021 week 12, I wanted to make my own wordless music with the instrument I feel most proficient at, my voice. I used a black screen for the video so if you are so inclined, you may want to put the video on full screen – let your screen go black and feel the music. This is my cry of a song for this young year already freighted with so much grief.
Songs
Into Your Hands
Every year for Good Friday my church puts out a call to artists to choose one of the seven last words of Christ and share something based on the particular last words they chose. For now our church is doing everything online – mostly Facebook Live – including the upcoming Good Friday service. I was getting ready to sign up for “Into your hands I commend my spirit,” and started writing the words to this song, before I realized our family’s plan to go camping that weekend will negate my ability to do any livestreaming that day.
Still, I liked what I had started and decided to go ahead and make it my song for week 11 of #songaweek2021.
Every winter I think I’m dying
Come the spring I feel like trying
Trying again
In the summer I know I’m living
Go to fall it all starts giving
Giving out, gone
On and on and on and on
Chasing down the speed of light
Face pressed up to window staring out of my existence
Back against the wall of furious insistence
Into your hands
Into your hands
I commend my spirit
Every night’s an invitation
To a sweet obliteration
Of all that I think I should be
In the morning I remember
Dreams that fade like dying embers
Light as dry leaves
Leaving, left, and lost
Chasing down the speed of light
Face pressed up to window staring out of my existence
Back against the wall of furious insistence
Into your hands
Into your hands
I commend my spirit
All Our Living Lives
“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do” randomly popped into my head this week, along with a tune. So I followed it out and wrote this song for week 10 of #songaweek2021. Recorded on a rainy day in March in my basement studio, the perfect kind of day to spend in a basement studio!
“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do”
That’s what you said but i don’t think it’s true
Somebody somewhere’s been lying to you
All your living life
Drop what you’re fighting and give me your hand
Let’s just relax for now
Follow me down where the waves meet the land
You’ve been waiting all your life somehow
“The bigger they are the harder they fall”
But that don’t seem right cause I’m feeling so small
I don’t know if you can hear me at all
All my living life
It’s never been easy for me to explain
Let’s just go somewhere new
Follow me hard like a runaway train
I’ve been waiting all of my life too
Out of the frying pan into the fire
Let’s just keep breathing now
Over the limit and under the wire
We’ve been broken open anyhow
Something about you, something about me
Something about the wind in the trees
Nothing much out of the ordinary
All our living lives
Come with me, run with me, under the sun
Let’s just embrace the day
Follow me close and I’ll try to keep up
Life is for the living anyway
Matter of Time
We’ve been in a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sort of mood around the house lately – Nathan and I just finished watching the fabulous Runnin Down a Dream documentary with our 17-year-old Luthien who is deep into schooling herself in the history of rock and roll, especially 90s music. (You can watch that documentary free at the Crackle link I attached to it!)
All that to say, I owe a good deal of the sound of this song to Tom and the band. The song itself came together surprisingly quickly; it felt as if I’d been carrying around this nebulous muck that got heavier over the winter, and somehow getting myself inside the head of the thing that was messing around in my head turned into this incredibly freeing, actually joyful-feeling rock song about aging and decay and everything as I know it falling apart.
Oh and Nathan added a plethora of guitar tracks, drums and bass (and he sang!) which certainly added to the joy for both of us in making this song! This is what being 45 feels like today, and I’m quite alright with it.
Week 9, #songaweek2021. I actually used the week’s prompt too, verbatim in the bridge (“you could turn back but why would you want to”). You can also download the song for free at our Cabin of Love bandcamp page – https://cabinoflove.bandcamp.com/track/matter-of-time
You’ve got sparkle, you’ve got spunk
You’ve got apocalyptic piles of pixie punk
I’m gonna dumb you down and lay you low
You won’t believe what hit you but I think you’ll know
Take it easy, it’s just a matter of time
Don’t take it personally, I’m gonna mess with your mind
Now you’re older, you think you’re so smart
You’re just a rusted cage around a broken-down heart
I’m gonna chill your bones and haunt your dreams
With ghosts of chances and washed-up schemes
Take it easy, it’s just a matter of time
Don’t take it personally, I’m gonna mess with your mind
You could turn back but why would you want to?
Nothing to see but visions of what might have been
So what you got now? What you gonna do
With whatever is left, is left up to you
I’ll keep right on rolling like I always do
And for a little while I might remember you
Take it easy, it’s just a matter of time
Don’t take it personally, I’m gonna mess with your mind
Take it easy, it’s just a matter of time
Don’t take it personally, nobody said I was kind
Make Your Way Home (cowrite with Laurie and David Easterling)
Now this was fun! The Easterlings are a couple in Tennessee who I met through my songaweek.org group, and they are prolific songwriters. Just about every week they post multiple new songs they’ve written with other people. The day of my Zoom session with them, David had already done another cowrite earlier that day.
In college I was part of a drama team that worked together to write and perform farces of well-known musicals, and that was some of the most fun I’ve had in my life! But since then, I’ve done very little collaborative writing. Being introverted, I feel most free in my writing process when I’m completely alone. As in no one else in the house. Which hasn’t happened much this year, but I’m grateful for the tiny studio Nathan built me in the basement, that helps me feel isolated enough to get creative.
David and Laurie were wonderful to work with. Our songaweek group has been doing monthly Zoom open mics all year so I’ve gotten to know them a bit through that already, and as I expected, our cowriting session felt like spending time with extended family or good neighbors. We had limited time but we pulled it off and wrote this song in about an hour, using the week 8 #songaweek2021 prompt “change please.” I really enjoyed the different feel of writing a song with other people. Always good to get a different perspective and a little glimpse into someone else’s creative process. Not something I will probably do regularly, but what I love about writing a song a week is that I feel free to try new things because everything isn’t riding on this week – there are always more songs to write!
You can find out more about David and his music at his website http://www.davideasterling.com.
Oh, and the picture for the song is a fairy house my daughter Luthien built on the banks of the Mississippi in summer 2019.
Please change your mind
Don’t leave me behind
I was desperate to say
But I left it unsaid
The words wailed in my head
You’re leaving today
May you never be sad enough to give up
Or too busy to explore the unknown
Remember no matter how far you go
You can always make your way home
I’ve been waiting so long
To sing my own song
Can’t stay in this place
Stretch my wings and try
To see where I can fly
Cast off my old ways
May you never be sad enough to give up
Or too busy to explore the unknown
Remember no matter how far you go
You can always make your way home
The road is always there
Time may not be fair
The same road that leads away
Leads back home someday
May you never be sad enough to give up
Or too busy to explore the unknown
Remember no matter how far you go
You can always make your way home
Julia Bloom 