Repetition of a melody line I didn’t want to forget.

This is the first recording of this song before I had fully worked out the lyrics and the bridge.

This is the first time I recorded this song that I later produced as a full-on multi-track effort. It is mostly true that the very best songs hold up really well as demos, not just when they are fully polished for release.

After several years of not recording demos, riffs, or melody fragments, I asked Mary for a microcassette recorder for Christmas, and received the one I wanted on December 25, 1986. It couldn’t have been more timely as I was about to enter a very prolific creative period, not just in music, but in the quest for personal identity and in the development of the Dramatica theory of narrative structure.

I recorded all of that in about fifty hours of tape spanning almost a decade. Then I ran out of things to say. For a while…

This was written at a time when my parents had embrace religion at the same time I was questioning my own beliefs. I decided to create something that put a more spiritual spin on the Jesus story and a little less emphasis on the deity part.

Oddly, this is one of the few songs I actually remember writing – actual process of sitting there with my guitar trying to work out the lyrics. I have no idea why I don’t remember the moment of writing most of the rest of them.

This one was inspired by the horror movie called The Strangeness that I directed in 1979-1980 but was never used in the film.

Here’s another one I wrote while grappling with issues of identity in my early 30s. Plenty here to decipher, if you know where to look.

This is from the same bargain bin as “Feeling Groovy” by Simon and Garfunkel and reminds me a lot of the feel of the main title theme in the 60s movie, Alfie, though not nearly as clever or polished as either of those. Alas.

I’d been reading a bit about synesthesia where a person hears colors or sees sounds. I began to wonder how that would change one’s view of the meaning of life and of death, and wrote this to explore the possibilities. As Dan Aykroyd says in the original Ghostbusters, “Listen, do you smell something?”

NOTE: The melody of this song made it into the horror film I directed in 1979-1980 called The Strangeness. You’ll find it played by one of the actors on a harmonica in the scene where they first enter the cave from the shoreline.