Dewey Kincade

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…

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…

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 Song

There was a coffee shop in Jersey City called Holiday.  I used to go there in the mornings with my girlfriend at the time. Only six months earlier, I had broken up with a woman I’d been with for several years. She’d dumped me. On my birthday. I later found out there was another guy. That’s the fortune cookie version. Of course, we had been living together for several years, so the breakup had the initial challenge of my finding a place to live in New York.  I wandered from couch to couch over 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…

One day I was alone in the apartment that I shared with my girlfriend Genevieve in Inwood and I wrote three songs. The first song was “One Line Epitaph.” This song eventually became the most popular song in The Navigators Catalogue (so far).  I had already written the music for it, so it wasn’t completely written in one day.

Feeling pleased with myself, I thought I would try my hand at another song that I had music for, but no lyrics.  That song became “Run to the Rock.”  While it would never be a hit, it…