I wanted to share a review of Danny Flanigan's new album Evergreen. 

Full disclosure: I have played with Danny many times over the years. He’s played with me in The Fellow Travelers and The Navigators, and I’ve shared a stage with a songwriter in the round for many years. He’s a great guy, and if you’re in Louisville and you’ve seen live music, you’ve probably seen him and not even know it. However, I realize that there are people who don’t live here, who should know about Danny’s music.

Within seconds, I…

There’s a theme that runs through a lot of the songs on this album: the power of the few over the many. Here’s just a sample:

Free-market lotto, it might happen to you

One person wins while millions have to lose.

And while the masters sit on high

The people fight to stay alive

But kings and queens cannot be blamed

It’s only numbers that decide

The great man he walks upon the stage

The little men are all dancing in his cage

That last one is from “Read My Mind.” This song has many threads, but it opens with a…

Many years ago —so long ago that Frozen had not yet been released— I wrote this song. I have always been a huge Simon and Garfunkel fan, and I was very fortunate to meet Paul Simon in person. My friend Graham Hawthorne, who has played drums with everybody (Cyndi Lauper, Roberta Flack, etc.), was filling in for Steve Gadd on a tour, and I got to go backstage. I didn’t say anything, which I kind of regret. What can I say? I’m very shy.

I honestly don’t recall anything specific that inspired this song. Just the…

Unless you slept through English class in high school, you probably know Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. As a songwriter who is probably best known for his original lyrics, you might wonder why I would write a song using someone else’s words. The answer is simple: this was a homework assignment. To explain that, I may need to give you a little backstory.

When I moved back to Louisville, I thought I might do an early childhood class that I did in New York City. It was very popular there. They had a six-month…

There was a time when I measured my songs in the number of pages. I was so proud when I wrote my first three-page song. As a big Dylan fan, I felt that it was perfectly okay to have long songs. That just meant that you had something to say. I started writing shorter songs around the time of Love and War: Volume 1. Part of the reason was that I had so many song ideas at that time. Sometimes I would write two or more a day, but during this period of my life, songs got shorter, because I had less time. I often…

So far, I haven’t really dug into the promised darkness. In order to understand that darkness, we have to go back a ways. As far back as I can remember, I liked to sing. When I was little, I would listen to records, so I could sing along. When I was seven or eight, my best friend moved to California, and I was very sad. There was no song that expressed how sad I was, so I just made stuff up and sang while I cried. It never occurred to me that I was doing something unusual. And maybe I wasn’t. Maybe that’s a…

It’s crazy that we call this time that we live in the information age. Sure, we have a lot of information, but a lot of it is garbage. And staying on top of what’s going on certainly doesn’t make you better off. I’d love to say that this was written from a knowing place of appropriate information-distance, but the truth is, I was once like Phil in the song- “an information-junkie and a cable-news whore.” I was plugged in to what was happening, and I was getting the talking points. I knew what was what. Or…

This song has a lot of layers- both lyrically and musically. I was playing the music on the guitar and thought, “This should be a song.” No plan, just some music. Sometimes I write place-holder lyrics when I want to remember the rhythm of the melody, so I began in that vein. Something about that first line captivated me, and when I got to the second line, I knew I wasn’t writing placeholder lyrics. I wasn’t writing so much as channelling from a very deep source. Something knew what to write, if I didn’t…

In the UK, the government is addressing the scourge of loneliness head-on with several initiatives. Loneliness shortens lives by making them less fun, so it makes sense that the government might step in. It’s odd that we might experience a loneliness epidemic given that there are more people on the planet than ever before, and we are all hyper-connected to one another. You’d think we’d have the opposite problem: a lack of privacy epidemic. But of course, our screens don’t bring us closer together.

But even…

I don’t like violence. I don’t encounter it very often in my life, though as a teacher I have been called upon to break up a fight. But I don’t like to watch it. I can. I have. It’s not the blood and guts that I find repulsive. It’s not the cold-blooded killing, but the hot-blooded killing that scares me the most. Watching anger in one person’s face, and the pain in another person’s face is hard for me to handle. I hope I never have to witness that in person. I don’t understand that feeling- the feeling of…

This song is all about the cycles and rhythms of life. Being a parent, working full-time, and that’s just life without the play-dates, after-school activities, special events, the meetings, the family functions, etc. I was hyper-aware of the movement of time, because it wasn’t until the end of the day that I could sit down in the basement and create in my studio. I was producing records for other people, and when I played the co-producer the music that I was working on, he said I sounded tired, which, of…

I was staying at my friend Wes’ apartment in Hell’s Kitchen when I wrote “I See You Clearly.” It was prompted by a conversation that I had had only a few days before with Genevieve, the woman I had recently broken up with. She had said that she felt like I didn’t see her, which I found a strange thing to say given that we had lived together for several years.  I knew that she hadn’t meant it literally, but it seemed like one of those creative spins on a problem that left me with no means of addressing it…

While this is not the last song on the album, this is the last song that I wrote on the album.  I hadn’t written any songs for a couple of months. I wouldn’t write another song for another couple of months. It’s not that it was a dry period for me. The band was doing well. We were starting to get out of town and playing Boston regularly. We were combing through my catalog, looking for songs to play.

One day, I heard that the guy my ex had left me for had stumbled onto a late-night train, and because he was…

Photo: Andrew Dailinger

I was on a road trip with my family, and we were listening to the new album. I wanted feedback on what the single should be because I had no idea. I was surprised when my wife picked “Everybody Wants a Piece of You.” For one thing, it’s a ballad. I’d been told that you don’t lead with a ballad because it doesn’t generate excitement. I’m starting to question that notion, though.

After a few weeks of seeing what people organically flock to, it seems that my wife may have had it right in…

Until I Let You Go
 

It had been about four months since the break-up. A lot had happened. I’d spent about five weeks in my friend Wes’ apartment. I’d written a play, an epic poem, and a couple of songs. I’d moved into my friend Drew and Geri’s apartment, and we built the walls for three bedrooms in a loft apartment. It’s amazing how productive you can be when you are feeling sorry for yourself. That’s not so crazy, I think. When I was still, I didn’t like how I felt, so I just kept moving.

I had done all my…

Phelim always used the phrase "three chords and the truth" to describe a lot of my songs.  That was a bit of an exaggeration. Most of my songs have more than three chords.  Not this one. This one has the same three chords in the same order over and over. As for the truth... I'll let you decide.  For such a simple song, it sure took a while to write.  Nearly fifteen years to be exact.  

I started writing this song when I was fifteen. By that point in my life, I was deeply enmeshed in Bob Dylan.  I wanted to…

So I was going to tell you about the writing of this song, and I went down a rabbit hole, which brought me back to the book I’ve been writing.  I thought about sharing the excerpt, but out of context it was just a jumble of questions referencing discussions that I haven’t shared with you. So instead, I’m going to give you the abbreviated story of the song, and share with you an AI analysis of the song, which will allow you to formulate your own opinions about whether AI is going to kill us all.

First the…

There is a kind of uncertainty in relationships towards the end. I had a real sense of dread and foreboding for the weeks leading up to the break-up. Despite living together, I didn’t see much of her those last few weeks. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I probably should have known better, and maybe I subconsciously did, because I wrote this. It’s about that feeling of hanging on by your fingertips, and you know that it can’t last.

She worked in a bar and two in the morning started becoming four in the…

The writing

The Heights is a reference to Washington Heights where I lived after a tumultuous period in my life. I mark the beginning of this period as happening right after I was dumped by my girlfriend of several years. It was a devastating blow for me as any breakup is, but with the added challenge of having to find a place to live while coping with the loss. I spent over three months without a fixed address.  Thanks to my friends, I was always able to find a place to lay my head.

I spent the summer dating…

I lived in a lot of cold places in my twenties. I wrote a song about them, and mentioned five different places in which I’d been cold. I changed the names of some of the places, but other than that, it’s all true.  I wrote:

I could feel the wind

I could see my breath

In a log cabin I nearly froze to death

And it was cold.

Now technically, the log cabin was an addition to a a home built around the 1970s.  It was a log cabin that the landlord had moved from Indiana, and we had been told that it was from the…

I've had a lot to say about this particular song. In fact, you can check out a previous blog post. I wrote the chorus when I was living with my band, Satori, in a log cabin. The chorus was directed towards a friend of mine, Brian Gager, who had been hospitalized and diagnosed as bi-polar. I knew nothing about the disease at the time, but I kept singing, “Get out of touch, get out of touch, you know too much.”  

Brian was a very bright young man. He was a great composer and songwriter.  I think we both had a…

I probably wrote this is an hour one day in Inwood. My girlfriend, Genevieve, was on tour with her theatre group, so I had some time to myself. It must have been shortly after 9/11, because the line about “fighting through that senseless war” was about soldiers being deployed to Afghanistan. The line “I crossed the waters” was about how I often uprooted myself to be with the women I was with.

The first time, I did that, I was twenty years old, and I moved to New York to be with my girlfriend, Ramona. I only…

I wrote this song in early 2000 around the same time that I had my first pass at “When Your Ship Goes Down.” I had wrapped up recording Lost and Found, and I was living in an attic room on Hilliard Avenue. Read the post on “Fairy Tales”, so I don’t have to repeat myself here. The short version: I had recovered from cancer, and had been pining for some time over this girl that I’ve been calling “Glory.” Not sure why I’m changing names. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind, but it makes it easier for me to write, I…

I wrote this song twice. The first time was in Louisville, Kentucky. I was living in an attic room on Hilliard Avenue. I had finished recording Lost and Found, and I was just waiting to get it mixed and everything. I think it was early spring. Unfortunately, I wrote it on my old computer- which was about fifteen years old. It’s not that it crashed, but I can no longer pull up any of the files on it or transfer it to anywhere else. So the only thing that remained about the song was the chorus, which I…

I remember writing “Why” when I was living with my girlfriend in Inwood. She was an intensely intuitive person, and we had had a whirlwind romance in Louisville, before moving up to New York City. I think the song reflected the challenges of returning to New York after my bout with cancer. I was 28 years old, and I was finding it difficult to find work. Five years earlier it had been a different story. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be in New York. Jules was a much more certain person. She would go after…