These are a few new songs I’ve just added from a recent local house concert. It’s challenging putting live material out for public consumption because there is no chance to clean up warts and blemishes. One take, that’s it, no editing. That’s also the beauty of live performance. It has a raw, immediate quality quite powerful to experience. Such an energy can be generated during a performance that little fumbles and mistakes on the guitar are far less noticeable, even unimportant (depending on your level of trained musicianship and ear sensitivity!).

Still, recordings of a live performance are a whole ‘nother colour of horse! You will hear fumbles here and there, but do try to de-emphasize those and focus on voice, melody and lyrics. That’s my particular strength; the guitar is there to provide background interest and hopefully not intrude too much.

Drown:

This song is from a dream in which a woman with long straight flame-red hair was dancing under a roofed shelter with no walls in a house downpour, twirling and sending her hair out like sheets of flame. As she danced, she sang this song to me. I introduce it as a ‘lesbian love song’.

Beauty is Free

This song is fairly recent; it grew from a moment of feeling utterly transported and knocked-out by the intense, overwhelming beauty I saw in everything around me. No drugs were involved.

Everything is True

This song is my answer to the hype about global warming. The song is saying, in essence, that Mama Earth knows exactly what she’s doing. We’re a part of it, we’re doing her work, even if we don’t understand it or what greater good might come from whatever collective part we play in the environmental changes happening now. Still, the song is not expressing endorsement of abuse. “Mama’s got a big lap, room for all her babies / She says we’re allowed to do pretty much as we please / But that don’t mean we get to do anything we want to..” It’s about finding the balance and acting according to our own sense of integrity.

Red Hands

When I first hear that Afghanistan was being bombed, I was utterly horrified and stricken. I could not believe that this poverty-stricken little country could be pounded on by the bombs of the world. For what? Because a terrorist was hiding there somewhere? Why couldn’t they send in an elite team of assassins? Nothing about it made sense to me; it felt to me like an act of pure, gratuitous, insanity. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that I was somehow involved, that those were my hands dropping the bombs. As a human, I am responsible for what humans do. This song speaks to that sense of responsibility. It’s a protest and a prayer at the same time. The ‘evil’ in the song refers not to the act of violence, but to the self-righteous justification and finger-pointing. “Evil walks the planet in our flesh / we point at others, whisper, “Wickedness! / They are the ones who must be shown that our God’s the one to dread…”

The Way to Say Goodbye

I wrote this one lo, these many years ago when a man I believed at the time to be the love of my life returned at last… with his fiance. They got married and I was invited to the wedding. It was a truly mythic experience! So of course I went home and wrote this song. It was about working through the processes of shock and betrayal and coming to a state of acceptance and release, letting go with love still intact. “I can love you like the eagle loves the sky / and that’s the way I say goodbye”

The Will to Live

This one is so recent that I’m not certain what it means specifically; it takes a while for me to really grok where the specific images in a song come from, what it means. It has to grow in me. But basically, this one comes from a very intense feeling that sweeps over me sometimes, a visceral, existential hunger to exist, to experience, to lust and live fully. It feels very good to sing! “I’m waiting for that antler-headed man / He goes by many names, I’ll call him Pan / Pan is my man…”

Fool’s Gold

This one is lighter on the surface, but has depth when you look more closely. I wrote it as a children’s song, in the sense that we are all children. There’s a bit of a twist at the end, it goes to an unexpected conclusion. It’s about goals, materialism and being careful about what we wish for. “Fool’s gold glitters in the light of day / Fool’s gold fades in the night away / Fool’s gold is nothing but a pile of leaves in the light of dawn…”

For Waiting

This song is a celebration of, and an exercise in, heart-opening to someone I once felt hatred for. It was written for someone I was in a bad relationship with long ago. After many years I became close friends with him, largely due to his patience and faith that there was something worth salvaging between us. Now, this song helps me keep my heart open while I return the favour. “Thank you for waiting for me / thank you for letting me be …”

If you want to download the songs, you can right-click on the links in the title and choose ’save as’. But you’d probably enjoy a live performance more. House concerts are low stress and easy to arrange; just get together a group of friends for a potluck and invite me. I’ll do the rest. If you’re interested, email me. I will travel if I can get together a string of linked venues and dates. So far I have one in Northern California!

Writing is hard for me, except for the times when it flows with ridiculous ease. The process has mystified me since childhood when every year without fail I would buy myself one of those little diaries with a lock and key, the kind with a page per day or sometimes two entries per page. I was fascinated with the idea of writing and I desperately wanted to keep a diary like the girls in stories did. "Dear Diary," I would write, then, stuck for words, leave the rest of the entry blank or write, "Just routine today," or "Nothing new today." One year, I abbreviated ‘Just routine today’ to the letters ‘JRT’ and filled an entire year with those initials.

I wrote a couple of stories and a comic book around the age of ten. I remember the comic book in particular. It featured two women, one blond and one brunette (inspired by Betty and Veronica, of course), who dressed in harem costumes and flew around the world having adventures on a flying carpet. I believe I was into ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ at the time, but I didn’t approve of her slavery nor her confinement in the bottle. I can’t remeber if these girls had any powers or magic beyond that of the flying carpet; I rather think they didn’t. Their friendship was the central theme of the story, perhaps reflecting the fact that I had a sister 14 months younger than myself and seldom did anything by myself.

When I was fourteen, I wrote a poem, the only actual poem of my life up until I began writing free-form poems and songs in my late twenties. The poem was entitled ‘The Bird Who Was Afraid of Heights." Unfortunately, much of it has been lost in the mists of memory though it was published in the local paper a couple of years after I wrote it, so is conceivably retrievable, at least in theory. It’s not a particularly wonderful poem, but it was my first and I have a soft spot for it still.

A little bird sat on the limb of a tree
Three hundred feet from the ground
He looked out to see what he could see
And his dizzy head spun around

"My gosh," cried he, "It’s plain to see
If I’m ever going to learn to fly
I’ll have to go a little lower on the tree
where it isn’t quite so high."

It’s the epic tale of a little bird who hops from limb to limb, unsuccessfully trying to find a tree branch that doesn’t seem too frighteningly high from which to jump. The tree is very tall and he is very small. He frets aloud about not being more like his brother Jim who is already a fine flyer. Time passes and he realizes that it’s almost dinnertime, and his mother (who is very strict) will ‘crucify’ him (!) if he doesn’t show up. Fear of Mom compels him to close his eyes and dare to step out into the void, where a few flaps proved to him that flying actually comes quite easily to birds. He joyfully flies home to dinner, and the poem ends with a moralistic turn:

The moral of the story as the little bird found out
Is that flapping your wings and flying is what life is all about

I was then and continue to be mostly ruled by fear which stops me from taking most of the risks I would dearly love to take in life, and I have been frightened of writing even more than anything else, frightened to the point of mental blocks, confusion when confronted with a blank screen and reluctance to sit still long enough to string two sentences together. What I do begin, I have tended not to finish (as witness Beyond Hope, though I hope to shift that pattern by actually finishing the novel).

I am saying all this and anything else that I write in this category because I hope that writing about writing will help me to understand my blocks and patterns, freeing me and opening the flow of words that currently jams my synapses and clogs my cranium. Be free, little words. Flow like water, like flame, stream through my mind and out my fingertips, create worlds and characters that live and breathe in the ethers of imagination. 

I’m saddened to learn that one of my favourite writers, Octavia Butler, has died. She was only 58. Read her work. You won’t be sorry…