My Dear, Will You Return?

When, when, my Dear, will you return? Will you return to me, to me?
When, when, my Dear, will you return?
Come when the hills are gently lit against the sky.
Come when the soldiers kiss their lovers all goodbye.
Come in black, come in white.

Where, where my Dear, will you return? Will you return to me, to me?
Where, where, my Dear, will you return?
Come to the meadow where we walked among the grain.
Come to the window where we watched the moonlight wane.
Come through fog, come through rain.

How could all these heartfelt words fade without a single sigh?
The reason why I inward turn, the hope with which my spirit burns.
Will you return, my Love? Will you return?

Will you return?




I like the vagueness of this song.

I could write a story around it. I could describe in detail what exactly the situation is that made these feelings well up inside some fake character's chest. I could write a Dickensian novel and describe the small town he grew up in, the moment when he saw his Love for the first time, the unlikely circumstances that brought them together and then the unlikelier circumstances that ripped them apart so suddenly that all those words simply faded without even a sigh. Ok, I probably couldn't. Or if I did, it wouldn't be worth scratch. But I'd probably like to leave the situation open-ended even if I could fill in every detail of the history surrounding this moment.
I think some things are better this way. It's kind of nice just to sit back and speculate what this guy might have been going through when he wrote this song. One question haunts me more than any other. Could it be that the girl is dead?
Normally I despise repetitive lyrics, but this one seems okay to me, maybe because the music is so unique. Then there are enough details to build up the illusion of a complete story: walks through fields of grain and watching the moon from the windowsill. I've never before written a song that was so little substance, so much pure feeling.

But, as I've probably written before, I don't truly feel that I've written this tune. More like it was buried somewhere and I dug it up and dusted it off. But that digging was some hard work. I'm not meaning to say that I didn't have to work hard at the song, but the ultimate result is hardly something I can think of taking back down and changing it around again. Some chump said that art is never finished, only abandoned. That's a crock.

I invite you to invent your own story around this little ditty. Maybe someday I'll be brave enough to make my own concrete.

video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSKqYWP1vdM

By the Morning

I shall wait here, wait 'til daybreak, 'til the sun lights up the windowsill.
The fog lies thick and opaque on the houses, and on the hills,
and still my heart is longing for some change to come on the landscape.

To show me that the night would finally end,
and that you'd be here by the morning.

I can hear the train, it rumbles far away, but still I know
it carries on, taking its people to places where they long to go.
It swells my heart to think that I'm moving so slow
from night to night with nowhere else to go

but you show me that the night would finally end...

and that you'll be here by the morning.






I wrote this song probably about 6 months ago. It's always been one of my favorites because of its succinctness.
That's the hardest thing for me in music, is to portray an idea with enough vagueness so that the listener can fill in the cracks. So many songs I've written have been five or six minutes long because I felt a need at the time to make crystal clear what I was communicating, then more often than not I ended up with a throw-away song. But this song is very short, and very small in scope. It's a simple song about hope and anticipation.
It's got a train in it, which I like.

It swells my heart to think that I'm moving so slow, from night to night with nowhere else to go.
It's true, I am behind. I've never had a chance to make any real quality recordings of the songs I love. I have written a plethora of songs but I've always seemed to lack the chance to share them with someone. I do love these songs, but something like that doesn't really reach its potential until you can share it with someone else and see that it touches them. I'd like my music to touch someone someday. It has happened in fleeting moments in the past, but seldom. More often I've been told that my music makes for a great sedative.

To This Land

I have to say, this is one of my favorites. This song is probably at least four years old, it's one of two acoustic guitar songs I wrote with the same four chords.
I may have said this before, but when it comes to a lot of these songs I truly don't feel like a "composer." I feel more like a miner. It's more like you just start fiddling around with notes until something predetermined and buried is uncovered. Now that I've studied music quite a bit I fashion it more into what I planned for it to be, but the material there is not something I can build. But this early song was definitely one of only a few that I immediately recognized as a little vein of gold.

I went through a lot of strife, I remember, in trying to name this song because I didn't want people to get presuppose that it's patriotic. It's not. In fact, when I wrote this song I was still relatively unsullied with the study of politics.
It's about waking up for the second time. I went through a very dark phase of life in middle and high school that made me numb and disillusioned, but then coming out of high school I started to notice things again. I started taking walks in the park and seeing the glint of the ripples in the gray Columbia River. I noticed the pavement, how it was broken out of place by tree roots, and it reminded me of being very small. I must have walked here once before. I remembered for the first time that I used to be the youngest part of a young family. The rows of carefully planted trees on the crest of the hill across the river, the bright leaves storming down like colored snow in late fall, the fragrance of the grapes of distant vineyards in the summer. All those things surrounded me when I was a child but I never recognized them. Then I went away for a long time, but now I was back home.
That's what this song is about.




I recall younger days when life was more than just work and play,
when all that we could not explain was something we could celebrate.
And I recall joyful tears, smiles spread from ears to ears,
before everything was measured, before we counted out our years,
and before boredom explained away all our fears.

Come into my heart, Dear. Complicated my life.
Something deep inside me here is screaming it's not right. It's not right.

I'm convinced that our lives were not meant to simply ignore one-another until we've been spent.
To be worn, as with erosion. And I will not be disillusioned,
for I feel the Love You've sent me.

So come into my heart, Dear. Complicate my life.
Something deep inside me here is screaming it's not right.

And all I need is something I can't understand.
And all I need is something I can't comprehend.
And all I need is something not concrete to hold within my hand,
within my hand.

And so You brought me to this land.




When I wrote the song I was still young and naive enough to honestly desire some girl to come into my life and complicate everything around me, and maybe I haven't quite overcome that weakness.
I know it's kind of a counter-intuitive idea, because typically we think in terms of how complicated this adult life is compared to what we call the simple life, being a kid in the backyard dirt. But that's not what I feel. Invoking these childhood feelings complicates my worldview with a desire for adventure, looking at life with newness, enjoying the mysteries of life without always feeling a need to explain them away.
It's also kind of strange still to use the word Dear, when there's really no girl that I can apply this kind of inspiration to. Somehow I was envisioning a girl when I wrote the song, but it was really was always very clear who the song really was about.

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