Owed To A Pelican

    Loaded up my car and put back home behind me
Got a good headstart to where the world won't find me

Soothing sun and salty spray wash away the everyday

And I know everything will be okay

When I see pelicans on the wind

Pouches packed    travelin'

No looking back at where they've been

Rest a while then gone again

Where the blacktop ends

And the sand begins

Pelicans

Six-pack choir singing songs at sunset

Around a driftwood fire with new old friends I just met

 The tide has turned  I can feel the change  It's the perfect end to a perfect day

When gliding gracefully above the waves

I see pelicans on the wind

Pouches packed    travelin'

No looking back at where they've been

Rest a while then gone again

Where the blacktop ends

And the sand begins

We're like pelicans

Where the blacktop ends

And the sand begins

We're like pelicans on the wind

Pouches packed    travelin'

No looking back at where they've been

Rest a while then gone again

Where the blacktop ends

And the sand begins

We're like pelicans on the wind

We're like pelicans   travelin' 

We're like pelicans   gone again

Pelicans

(Dad Zone Music ASCAP/Flatbilly Songs ASCAP)

       While not exactly "To a Waterfowl" by William Cullen Bryant, this song that I wrote with  Roy Holdren also compares some humans to certain water-dwelling birds.

       I'm not quite sure when the idea first came to me, but I am certain that Bryant's poem was one of the last things on my mind when it did. I can't say that I never read it, but it had probably been 40 years or more ago. I re-read it in preparation for this piece, and will probably read it several more times. I'm not at all certain that it is only about what that graduate student teaching English at East Carolina University led me to believe.

     I have included Bryant's poem at the end end of this piece. I suggest sitting down with it when you you have the time and headspace to absorb and ponder.

     A producer friend of mine had invited me to join him and his artist on his houseboat for a writing session. They were looking for country songs on the coastal side of things. We tossed ideas around, and settled on a hook I came up with. (That's what I was there for, after all.) "It's A Shore Thing" seemed to be just what they were looking for. ("This ain't no summertime fling, it's a shore thing") We started pitching each other coastal imagery that would fit into a boy-meets-girl-and-yes-it's-true love scenario.

     At some point, I mentioned a pelican, and my friend went off on me. 

    "Pelican? Seagulls are the iconic ocean bird. It has to be a seagull!"

    I responded that you could find seagulls at the landfill, but if you saw pelicans, you had truly arrived at the coast.

     "'Pelican' is such a clunky word! Nobody's ever going to sing a song about a pelican."

    Well, it was his session, and all I really had invested was my time, so I acquiesced. But I also accepted his unknowing challenge.

     Back home, I was goofing around with my guitar, and I started singing "Pelicans on the wind".

I started thinking about pelicans more deeply. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking about what pelicans had in common with people who were living a nomadic lifestyle. I came up with most of a chorus, although it was by no means finished or polished. Fortunately for me (and for listeners) I was mere days away from a session with one of my favorite co-writers. Roy Holdren was coming in from Minnesota. He and I have written more than a few really good songs together. We have similar senses of humor and grasps of the craft. He is also a better guitarist than me, and a great singer.

     I showed Roy this thing I was working on, and he jumped right in.

     I'll spare you the details of the writing session, but once we were done, I banged around on the song for a couple of weeks, before taking it over to River Front Recording in Madison, Tennessee. Pat Lassiter, Tim Galloway, Mike Holmes, and Will Ellis helped me turn the song into the recording at the top of the page. If you haven't listened, what are you waiting for?

     Here's another totally unrelated pelican story.

     Back when I lived in North Carolina, and our children were still quite young, we used to to rent a house at the beach (usually in the Emerald Isle area) for a week every summer. One year, we had some extra space, so I invited a friend down for the last half of the week. Harlan Needham is a multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire, and we had done a bit of guitar/mandolin duo work in some venues around the Raleigh area. I told him to come on down. We could relax on the beach in the daytime, and go out picking at some bars in the evenings. 

      We were sitting out in the sand one afternoon, when Harlan said "I haven't seen a pelican in forever." As if right on cue, about thirteen pelicans came floating by on the breeze in a lazy formation. 

Harlan didn't miss a beat. "I haven't seen a pterodactyl in forever."

      The pterodactyls never showed up, but years later this song did.

      And I'm still trying to decipher this poem.

To a Waterfowl

By William Cullen Bryant

Whither, 'midst falling dew

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark they distant flight, to do thee wrong,

As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,

Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st though the plashy brink

Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,

Or where the rocking billows rise and sink

On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power, whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,

The desert and illimitable air

Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day they wings have fanned

At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere;

Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,

Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end

Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,

And scream among they fellows; reeds shall bend

Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven

Hath swallowed up thy form, yet, on my heart

Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given

And shall not soon depart.

He, who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight

In the lone way that I must trace alone

Will lead my steps aright.

No, I'm Not Interested In Co-Writing With You

     A few years ago, I was contacted by a guy who had written a charting country radio hit back in the '80s. He said he wanted to co-write with me. I told him we could check it out. Then he sent me a finished (but in my mind, poorly-written) song for us to work on. I told him I wasn't in the business of "fixing" people's songs, and that wasn't what I considered co-writing to be. He got very angry, and told me "I don't need nobody to tell me how to write songs!"

     That was the last I heard from him for a while.

     He approached me again, right after I came offstage one night about 6 months ago, to introduce himself, give me a business card, and inquire about co-writing. I politely tucked his card into my guitar case, but told him I didn't do much co-writing these days. I thought he would take the hint.

     I have run into him three or four times since then. He always tries to give me his card, and he always asks me about co-writing. I always tell him I'm not interested. I don't say "I've heard you play your songs, and they are nothing I am interested in", even though that's what I'm thinking. I attempt to be more diplomatic than that, but I guess I'm doing a poor job of dissuading him.

     He can't seem to grasp the fact that I am not interested in trying to write songs with him. There are a number of people who flock around him, and tell him he's "great". I guess it doesn't make sense to him that there is someone who doesn't think that. I am unfailingly polite to him, but crossing paths from time to time is as far as I want to take our relationship.

    Today, he stepped it up a notch, and sent me this private message:

          "i became a fan of your writing,ill never be able to write em like you do,

           your awsome,iam just learning songwriting, your a great 

           entertainer also, iam also sorry,for asking about cowriting,iam 

           not that good,a songwriter you probaly noticed that, so my 

           mastake,it wont happen again,my word, keep up your amazeing 

           carear,,your fantastic"

           "sorry to bother you,"

     He also attached a photo of his younger self, standing in a room with some instruments, and a bunch of records on the wall. Passive-aggressive, much? I guess he showed me.

     I'm still not interested in writing with him. Even less, now.

     I wonder how long before he asks again.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

     I woke up this morning about 4am with one of my old songs in my brain. It was something I had written in the very early 1980s. I could remember almost all of the lyrics, except for the beginning of the second verse. After getting up out of the bed, and moving around a little bit, the words all came back to me. I even remembered the chord changes and melody. I also realized what a pretentious piece of work it was.

     At the time that I wrote it, I was listening to a lot of Townes Van Zandt's music. I was playing in college town bars, and covering songs by him, Kris Kristofferson, and Jesse Winchester, in addition to Hank Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, and some country, rockabilly, and old-time rock 'n' roll tunes. I was starting to hang out with other writers who read books, and poetry, listened to traditional folk music and blues, and told exciting and exotic (or so it seemed to me) stories. I slipped right into a "Let me show off my vocabulary. Surely people will be amazed" phase.

RENEGADE
You try to burn your bridges down the moment that they're built
Into my mind you've plunged confusion way up past the hilt
You rash rapacious renegade you burning shooting star
Unfortunate mistake I made and the consequential scar

     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade

Love me for a little while and stay 'til you must leave
But please don't tell me stories you don't want me to believe
A Rapunzel or a rapparee a lover or a thief
Your indecision instigates my flux from mirth to grief

     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade
     Oh oh renegade

     The crowd I was running with all seemed to really like the song. The girl I wrote it about even wrote a reply song (the next day) called "Renegade Woman", letting me know that she only wanted me when she wanted me, and she certainly didn't need me. In spite of the fact that my love life was virtually non-existent, I was quite impressed with myself, even though I often felt like I couldn't hold a candle to some of my "peers".

     But at some point I came to the realization that people's eyes would glaze over if I pulled out a song like that at a campfire or dive bar. I had to face the fact that I wasn't writing songs for English professors, and that I had a better chance of communicating with people if I wrote songs with words that more people understood. In certain circles, the songs went over fine, but intellectuals and artistes are such a niche market. Nobody talked the way I wrote songs, at least not contemporaneously.

     I began to choose my words more carefully. I found that my songs that sounded like the way people actually talked got a much warmer reception than the ones that audiences needed a dictionary to listen to (and in fact were often written with one open in front of me). Not to say, I won't throw a challenging "fifty cent word" into a song these days, but the ten dollar ones are generally nowhere in sight, nor within earshot. Polysyllabic can be problematic, so I have learned to keep it simple.

It's much less complicated that way.

A Fowl Perspective

    Every now and then, I catch myself going "I wonder what the chickens think about that".

                                

   This morning, it was snowing lightly up here in the holler. The ground was wet, but not frozen, so there was not much chance of it sticking. Still, I started wondering what the reaction would be from the chicks that had hatched since the last time snow was on the ground. Everything is probably still a brand new experience to them, so they might not think about it at all.
    I can remember snows past, where we woke up to a thick white blanket on the ground. The birds seemed like they were not at all amused about this turn of events. It didn't stop them from wandering out and about, but I'm sure it changed their daily routines. It also makes them way more visible to airborne predator, which is something we found out the hard way.

                                     

    We have four hens who sleep in a tree, and refuse to go into the nice, secure, weatherproof coop, no matter how nasty it gets outside. Many a morning, they have come down completely covered in frost, to follow the man (me) with the bucket of scratch out to the yard where the rest of the chickens congregate when I let them out of the coop. There are nights when the wind is blowing so hard that I think surely it will knock them out of the tree, only to find them securely fastened in the morning. We never have figured out why they prefer the tree to the coop.


                              

    Anyway, this morning when I started pondering once again what chickens think about, I remembered the full solar eclipse of a few years ago. Where we live, we had the full total eclipse visible from our yard. We had a couple of guests. One of our daughter's roommates from grad school and a friend had asked about camping on our property so they could view the eclipse. We told them we could do better than that, and they could stay in the house, shower, use the kitchen, and the pool. When the eclipse started happening, we set chairs out in the front yard and got comfortable. As it progressed, and the world seemed to go still and quiet, our dog came out and stood near us. Then, all of the chickens came out and stood around us, stock still and silent. They remained that way, seemingly transfixed, until the eclipse was over, and then they went back about their business. It was one of the strangest things I've ever witnessed. I still don't know what they were thinking.

                                      

    Of course, a chicken's brain is as big as an acorn at best, so they might not be thinking at all. They might be merely reacting. Maybe I'm doing all the thinking.
     And probably too much of it, at that.

Move Your Art, So It Can Move You

           When I played at the Bluebird Cafe a couple of weeks ago, my friend (and fan) Steve
Mcnaron from Nashville Ear tagged along, as he has done in the past, and I hope he continues to do in the future. He videotapes my sets, and those of any other artists who are amenable, to post on his website. He is a great supporter of the songwriting community in Nashville.
            Steve is also a visual artist. I had seen several of his works online, but never in person until he presented me one in the parking lot of the Bluebird. He said that based on the photos of my home and surrounding property that he had seen, he thought he had the perfect painting picked out. (I'm trying not to read too much into the fact that it's a shithouse.) I showed it to my wife the next morning, and she agreed that it was very nice, and we should try to find a place to hang it. We have a small house, and a lot of art, so we had to shuffle some things around.

     We settled on a spot above the fireplace in our dining room. The Israeli watercolor that had been hanging there moved to the spot above the piano in the living room. That got us started re-thinking where everything was hung. We took a nice painting of a New York fire escape with a park in the background off the wall in the dining room, and replaced it with a fantasy print our daughter had given us, that was not getting enough eye action in a darker corner of the living room. We put the painting on a wall in our bedroom that had previously been mostly bare. It looks great there. A mandala print replaced the fantasy print in the living room.
      Suddenly, we were seeing our art again. After years of hanging in the same spots, where we had gotten so used to seeing them that we neglected to "look" at them, the art was once again coming to life in our house. My father-in-law apparently had a six-month schedule of moving art back and forth from his office to his home, in order to keep things fresh. I wish we had thought of this sooner. It's almost like having a new collection. I would recommend this approach to anyone who needs a breath of fresh air.
       So, it turns out that Steve gave us more than a painting. He gave us our art back.
       Thanks, buddy!

A Symbol Of Hate

     Okay, what I'm about to say will probably anger some of my southern friends, but here goes...

     

     The confederate flag that you love to wave as a symbol of your heritage is actually a symbol of hate and divisiveness. You may not want to see it that way or admit it, but it is. Like the swastika before it, which was actually an ancient symbol of well-being before it was hijacked by Hitler, the confederate battle flag has become a symbol of supposed racial superiority and hatred of those who are different from you. From now on, it will never be anything but that.

     If you are more bothered by people who are offended by the waving of the flag than you are by the people who turned your symbol of heritage into one of hate, then you are part of the problem. 

     That is the sad truth.

Junk 'Em If They Can't Take Folk

"I've said it before and I'll say it again
Junk 'em if they can't take folk..."

I came up as a musician during a time when songs meant something, and they often had important things to say. Granted, some of my songs are just goofy little ditties of no social importance, but I also write songs that say things that I feel like need to be said. I have a hard time divorcing who I am as a person from who I am as a musician, mostly because I feel like I shouldn't have to.

I have been told that I shouldn't put "Jesus Wouldn't Do It That Way" on my new CD, or that it should be last, so that I don't lose people before the end of the CD. There were people who complained about "Not In My Backyard" on my "One More Night In Nashville" CD, because I castigated corporations who shipped jobs out of the country and big box stores that ran Mom & Pops out of business. I was told "If you weren't too lazy to cut your own grass, they wouldn't have had to shut the factories down and send jobs overseas" by someone who totally didn't get who the bad guys are. I have lost "friends" on Facebook who sent me requests because they liked my music and assumed I thought the same way they did, until they found out I didn't, and were mortally offended. I have received death threats from former "fans" because I supported Bernie Sanders.

I'm sure there are people who are upset that I encouraged folks to buy music from Bandcamp on August 4th because a portion of the proceeds would be going to help the Trans community. Too bad! I'm still going to write songs, and I'm still going to be me. Those two aspects of who I am are not mutually exclusive in my book.
If you can't enjoy my music because of who I really am, that's on you. If you can't enjoy my music because it sucks, that's on me.
Have a nice day...and listen to some music.