#6: Ancient Sunlight (February 6, 2011)

This week's effort is a brand new song, written in the last few weeks: "Ancient Sunlight".  This has to be categorized as pretty much a pure folk song. It was inspired by the book "The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight", by Thom Hartmann,a book I whole-heartedly recommend. The premise: petroleum is the energy created by ancient sunlight, millions of years in the making, but "gone in just a few". It has made possible the rapid technological growth of the last century, but simultaneously endangered our species, both by the rapid build-up of greenhouse gases from its combusiton, but perhaps even more, by our almost total dependence on its enormous energy content, a dependence that will likely lead to catastrophic consequence by its essentially overnight (historically speaking) disappearance. Enjoy... and consider.

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#7: Sink Or Swim (February 12, 2011)

This week's effort is a brand new song, written in the last week or so: "Sink or Swim".  A rambling, "talking blues" tune, with some Biblical references, if you can tease them out. Ruthie, Clark, Jason & I recorded it.

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#8: Blues Won't Get You (February 20, 2011)

his week's effort is a song that's been with me for a couple of decades: "Blues Won't Get You". I suppose it might be a blues tune; it says so in the title. But like a lot of songs, it pulls from many sources. The primary source was the first line. I can almost remember sitting with my guitar, playing a G chord (it was in G in 1990), and singing "Jacob ain't a leaver, he's a believer", and the rest just sort of came tumbling out. Songwriters and poets know whereof I speak: oftentimes (not always, but often), we don't write songs so much as record what shows up in our minds, directly transcribing from the Muse. If we're lucky, we get it right before she flits away. She can be capricious.

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#9: Fountain Of Youth (February 27, 2011)

This week's effort is a brand new song; the ink is hardly dry: "Fountain of Youth". I'm afraid there is a little story that must be told about its creation. A few weeks ago, I celebrated, via Facebook, the birthday of a young friend whom I had not seen in over two decades, not since she played a young Gunevere to my older Arthur in Camelot at Giles Heritage Theatre up in Pulaski. When I discovered the age she had reportedly reached, I wrote here, chiding her for punking the FB community: there was no way she could be that old. She wrote back and said how sweet it was that she was always 18 in my mind.

And something clicked in my brain.
 
In that moment, I realized that, in someone's mind somewhere, someone who has not seen us for years, we are all captured in time, forever young, never-changing. The first verse of this song leaped into my mind, and I sent it to my friend Dana, who promptly wrote back with a couple of lines, which I have incorporated into the middle eight of this tune. "Fountain of Youth" may at first strike you as a lament, a nostalgic yearning for "the road not taken". It is not. Rather, it's the realization that there is always only one road, and all of our choices and actions pave every inch of its length. And yet, even though we think we stand immutable at the end of our dominos, all fallen and already pushed over, there is, somewhere for almost everyone, a person who holds a memory of us, a pure person who never stepped out on that road. For our part, we hold others in our memories, our friends from childhood, or perhaps high school pals, and we cannot imagine them a day older. Or wiser. Or wizened. This arrangement seems to me to be a door into another place, one that we may not be able to actually step through, but a door whose very existence takes away some of the burdens of our existence.
 
Thanks, Dana, certainly for your gracious contribution, but ever so much more for your inspiration. Enjoy... and please let me know what you think.

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#10: Got My Mojo Working (March 6, 2011)

This week's effort is a straight up blues. The phrase "got my mojo working" has a long bloodline, and a lot of people have made it into one of their songs. This is my spin on it, and yeah, it has to owe a lot to those who came before. But it's got something to say, thank you very much. Hope you have as much fun watching it as we did playing it.

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