Song #3 – “Just Another Day”

It’s after work on a Friday. 

Busy day … good day… amazing week.  Call me a freak but I love my job, and I’m beyond grateful for that. 

Song three was born last week and I’ve been chipping away at the words, breathing spaces, notes, and tracks since. 

It’s funny, this new way I write.  The process is changing,  or maybe I got patient.  

When the moment happens, or “the happening”, when I know a song is going to enter the room, these days, I roll with it.  

Historically, the “happening” became the “there it is”.   And here we are.  

Lately, the “roll with it” becomes the “this is what I’ve got for now”.  Then throughout the next couple of days or week, other words find their way to a page.  Gifts from dreams always find their way back, it’s like they were never really gone or missing to begin with.   

I never worry about forgetting an idea or words any more because I believe that whatever inspiration I’m lucky enough to have come my way, is something I don’t own.  No one owns it, it’s just there, like air. 

There are so many days when I look at this music songwriter thing I’ve been obsessed with since forever, and I ask myself why.  Give up. Quit. Just stop it already.  I’m not any good anyhow.  And now I’m old.  Too old, too late, and too shitty. A shitty singer songwriter.  Then I wonder, do all songwriters feel this way? All artists?  Even the good ones? I mean, I have a reason to feel this way.  Sorry, I think I’m just trying to make a point.  

Then 1996 floods my mind.  I had quit writing songs.  Nothing about music motivated me. It was just a pay-check from a gig in a smokey bar somewhere probably in southern Alberta.  I know I was depressed, on auto-pilot just trying to exist.   CMT had a special on  Mary Chapin Carpenter that day. I stopped whatever I was doing and listened to her tell the story of “This Shirt”.  

I felt the first moment of  inspiration that I’d felt in years.  “Levi Strauss” was born that day.  Written, beginning to end, the complete current version, in 15 minutes.  It exists on Apple Music, and if you’d like the lyrics please let me know, I’ll share. I’m most proud of this song.  I love this work I did. Not the singing ….not the version on the record …. But the song.  The words.  Mary Chapin Carpenter taught me something that day … and to me, my Levi Strauss is Mary’s This Shirt.  

“Just Another Day”, song three. There is more to the title but I’m not going to share that yet. This one was rewritten four(ty?) times in the past week and I’m still editing.  I have a notepad by my bedside to catch those words that escape my dreams and it’s almost there.  

I feel like I need to finish this blog post with a message. 

Hey you. You know who you are. Please know that the older you get, the less the voices picking at your soul matter.  We are on this world for a blink, in the grande scheme of things.  A blink.  Do the art, embrace the thing, pick a career, honour your soul and surround yourselves with whatever contributes to propelling the best version of you forward.  Even if it’s criticism, skepticism and doubt sometimes, because all of it makes up the threads that weave every ounce of who you are, together. 

signed an almost very old lady, 

T