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Lyrics, Samples, and the Stories Behind the Songs

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Mirrors

Waiting For the Countdown (Lyrics)
In 1992, about a year after the first Gulf War, I and my friends Enrique and Phoenix were reminiscing about how we had felt at the time the war started, and specifically about how we’d felt when rumors started that King George I (of course, we didn’t call him that back then...) was going to ask Congress to reinstate the draft if the war lasted more than three months. I picked up my guitar and played a chord progression that had been running through my mind, saying that I had an idea for a song called “Waiting For the Countdown”—a phrase which spoke to my feelings at the time that the “other shoe” was coming down any minute. To my amazement, Enrique started singing. Then I started singing. Then Phoenix started singing. Before we knew it, we’d written a song. I consider this song to be the second in a trilogy, the first one being Pawns In the Game from Just Me and My Guitar v2.0 and the third being More to Fear, as yet unreleased.

Lightbringer’s Fall (Lyrics)
This song started life as a poetic exercise in my first-semester creative writing class in college, in which I wrote about my feelings regarding work, school, growing up, and life in general. The exercise was to write a free-verse poem with four stanzas of three lines each. The first line was to start “I used to”, the second “But now”, and the third was to be a short phrase, repeated verbatim in each stanza. The poem I wrote for this exercise was even called “Lightbringer’s Fall,” though the refrain in the poem was “I got better, you see.” It was only a few months later that I got the bug to make it a song, and though the actual words were changed significantly, the ideas are pretty much the same.

And no, you may not read the poem. ;-)

By the bye, the last verse deliberately references three literary works: the science fiction books To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert Heinlein and The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin; and the album The Wall by Pink Floyd. I’ll let you figure out the symbology.

Mirror (Lyrics)
The title song of this album was the result of my re-reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Mirror of Her Dreams during a bout of severe unemployment-induced depression in early 1991. (The Mirror of Her Dreams is an excellent book, but not for the squeamish or the easily depressed.) It was one of those songs that “wrote itself” over the course of an afternoon. All of the situations in this song actually come from just the first half of the first chapter of the book, which deals with the main character’s feelings of isolation and unreality, feelings that I at that time could definitely sympathize with.

Oh, and despite the fact that Allison Lonsdale and I both have had very good luck in using severe depression to fuel songwriting...we don’t recommend it!

God Help Us All (Lyrics)
This song started out as a very PC breakup song—you know the kind, “We’re okay, but we’re wrong for each other, so let’s quit now before things get ugly.” But then, at the first chorus, it swerved into infidelity, becoming completely non-biographical in the process. It ended up taking over a year to write, but I’m so happy with it that I don’t mind. It’s also my first blatantly Country & Western song. But that’s okay, too, somehow.

Champs Élysées (Lyrics)
The other song on this album inspired by a book, this one is based a passage from Roger Zelazny’s The Courts of Chaos, the last book of the first Amber chronicle. It again started with a chord progression, and when I played it for Allison one day, images from this passage started to come to her mind, and she started singing (seems to be a trend, here). I wrote down what she sang, looked at it over the course of the next few days, added two verses, polished it up, and voila—we had a song.

And again, the passage that this song is based on is a very small fraction of the book, but one that is beautifully written. It is about the main character remembering being in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, remembering all of the things that happened to him there, all of the sights and sounds and smells—and all of these memories are flooding his mind as he is trying to stop the end of the world (as is only proper for fantasy adventure books).

Hippie Jack’s Unsmokable Hash (Lyrics)
This song is what I would otherwise call an abomination: a filk of a song that was already funny. The original song is of course Stu Venable’s marvelous “Happy Jack’s Undrinkable Ale” (which The Poxy Boggards recorded on the equally wonderful album, Bawdy Parts, sadly no longer available), a song that was often sung by my former band, The Wild Oats. Well, one day Craig accidentally refers to the song as “Hippie Jack’s Undrinkable Ale,” then realizes his mistake and says, “Actually, that should be ‘Hippie Jack’s Unsmokable Hash.’” To this, I respond “‘One mighty puff knocks you flat on your ash’?”

If I’d been smart, I would have left it at that. But no! I had to go and actually write the thing. And then I had to go and perform it at a concert! I’m just lucky as hell that Stu decided he liked it...

At Night She Comes Home (Lyrics)
Believe it or not, the inspiration for this song was a somewhat bawdy folk song called “Down At the Inn”—one of those songs that can go on as long as people can continue to think up new verses. (I remember an SCA fire circle where the good people of House Ritterwald and company sang it for nearly an hour straight.) The conceit of the song is that one declares what one's spouse does for a living, says what he or she does all day, and then says that “At night he/she comes home and...drinks tea.” For example:

My wife is a glazer, a glazer, a glazer,
A very fine glazer is she.
And all day she blows glass, she blows glass, she blows glass,
And at night she comes home and...drinks tea.

This is followed by the simple chorus, which is little more than a repetition of the phrase “Down at the inn.”

You can, I'm sure, see the parallels to “At Night She Comes Home.” In fact, this song was originally intended to be comedic, but the imagery that came to mind as I was writing it was rather too dark for humor; thus, the song emerged as it exists today: a sad commentary on how the working world can sap the life out of us.

Storms (Lyrics)
If God Help Us All is about infidelity, this song is about poorly managed polyamory. At the time I wrote this, my girlfriend and I were in an open relationship, and she had pretty thoroughly latched onto a new boy-toy, leaving me kinda wanting for her attention. Needless to say, this caused some strife and disharmony, especially within me. This song came out of that—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this song tore its way out of that with bloody claws and a mouth like a shoebox full of teeth...

I would like to thank Cameron Campbell for some inspiration as to how to record this song. He did a cover recording of it many, many years ago and included some things that I thought were cool, and which I’ve used in this recording.

Resolutions (Lyrics)
I wrote this song because I wanted a musical expression of my therapeutic process. Dr. Arne Liss, the World’s Greatest Therapist™, has been my therapist for the past, well, many years. Probably closing in on a decade, in fact. And he has helped me through some of the toughest times of my life. Even during the relatively calm periods, he’s helped me understand myself better, and I have no doubt that I would not be who or where I am today without him. This song is dedicated to him and the help he’s given me over the years.

And yes, this song deliberately references The Beatles’ “Revolution”, The Who’s “My Generation”, and The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil”.

Terminally Seventeen (Lyrics)
I wrote this song in anticipation of my ten-year high school reunion—in fact, the title of this song was originally “Terminally 17 (High School Reunion)”, but I decided later on that it didn't need the subtitle. It was inspired by a song by Allison Lonsdale called “Lost Along the Coast Road”, in which she reminisces in the first verse about where some people in her early life are today. I thought it would be fun to write a whole song like that, so I did.

This was one of those songs that grabs the writer by the throat and won’t let go until it’s finished. I was working as a delivery driver at the time, and I ended up being late (in some cases very late) to about half of my delivery points because I was furiously writing this song. In one case, at a company where a friend of mine was working at the front desk, I entered and immediately said, “I’m so sorry I’m late. My muse is a demanding bitch.”

As a post-script, though I didn't end up attending my ten-year reunion, I did go to the twenty-year and performed this song at it. Of course, no one who is mentioned in the song was there...

Black Train (Lyrics)
This song, begun early in the year that my mother died of breast cancer and finished about a year later, is entirely dedicated to Mom, aka Lani Rose Jeansdottir, formerly Lani J. Rosenberger, midwife, witch, healer, organizer, and the woman who taught me about music. She died in August of 2001, and I still miss her terribly.

Breast cancer affects one in eight women some time during their lives, and kills one in 33. It is the second most common cancer (behind skin cancer) in women, and also the second most deadly (behind lung cancer). However, the death rate has been going down in recent years, mostly due to new detection technologies that can find breast cancer earlier, and thus treat it with a much lower chance of recurrence. For more information, and to help in the fight against this disease, please go to the American Cancer Society website at http://www.cancer.org.

Stay With Me Tonight (Lyrics)
An unabashedly autobiographical song about the first couple of years of my relationship with an ex-girlfriend. I wrote the first verse and all three choruses in one day, then it took a year each for the second and third verses. Sometimes the songwriting bug works in strange ways...

SECRET BONUS TRACK...Shh! Another cover, but very different from last time. I think you’ll like it. ;-)