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…

I got to the airport, and I got on the plane back to New York. I don’t know how. It’s odd that I don’t remember that. I suppose a therapist might say that I blocked it out. It doesn’t feel good to be the one that breaks someone’s heart. It doesn’t feel good to take something like a relationship that has the potential to be, well, anything, and to kill it off. And I couldn’t even tell anyone about it.

I mean, people knew. My friends knew that I was in a relationship that had an expiration date on it. I had…

In the midst of a tumultuous year, there were a few moments when the world seemed positively friendly. I reconnected with a college friend one night. For an evening we talked about the past, the world, the future, but I don’t think I spent a lot of time thinking about my break-up, and it made an impact on me. I went home and started to write the song, but the opening lines leave a lot to live up to.

Thank you for tonight

I’ll remember this moment for the rest of my life

I mean, where do you go from there…

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…

What about those other love songs? Romantic love always gets top billing, but how about a shout-out for those other people we love- our friends? You know, the ones who pick you up when you’re down. The ones who are happy to spend time with you and your significant other and then are happy to hear your sad stories when you get dumped by said significant other. I have had my share of bum luck, but I gotta say that I hit the jackpot with my friends.

When I found myself suddenly without a home to go back to 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…

When I first wrote this song, I thought for sure that I had unconsciously plagiarized the melody. I knew the lyrics were all mine, but I thought I must have heard this melody somewhere before. This haunted me for years. I was afraid to play it out of fear that I would be exposed as a fraud for having stolen someone else’s melody. It’s been over a decade, and I still haven’t heard the song that I worried I might have ripped off because I never did.

What I experienced shortly after I wrote the song was an…

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…

At some point, I considered writing a book detailing this time in my life. Who knows? Maybe it will see the light of day.  This is one of the chapters. The names have been changed, and I can't say that it's non-fiction. Time has passed. Memory is faulty. So while it may not be factually true, it is emotionally true, and I think that counts. 

Her life seemed like a tragedy. A woman in her twenties getting cancer and then only a few months later, her father is diagnosed with lung cancer. She’d had a brother…

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'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…