Lyrics and Notes

I wrote this song at a particularly low point of my social life. It had been months since I had anyone special, and I decided (as most men do at some point) that enough was enough and I was certainly capable of solving this problem. So I made a concerted effort to get dates with any woman who looked nominally attractive and sounded marginally sane. Yes, impressive standards.

I was eating lunch in a diner two blocks from my house and this very nice looking, too young woman (I use the term to validate my impulses) was serving me. She was friendly, intelligent, of good humor, etc. So I asked her if she'd like to go out. Two days later I was driving out to her parents' home. She had her own place but for some reason this was a better meeting spot. Dad didn't look at all happy to meet me. I later learned he owned the entire city block that contained the diner...

So we drove around, chatted, me thinking this could be a great date, her apparently thinking that she needed a wild time. The only sins a man regrets are those he never commits. In the course of these two ships passing in the night, I learned the dysfunctional history of her last boyfriends and how badly they had treated her. It took me a couple years to really take this lesson to heart, but I am a slow learner. And that's what this song is, the first 'Ah ha!' of the romantic man realizing that nice guys really, truly do finish last.

This was recorded in the old studio on the Tascam 8-track cassette machine. I played and sang everything. To give you an idea of the song's age, I made a killer cassette cover on an old photocopier, with my head under the lid.

I'm lucky to live just a few blocks from the bay. The city put in a boardwalk about ten years ago, hoping to attract tourists. Our gale-force winds did not deter them, neither did Highway 101, which runs parallel about 20 feet away. The owner of the small grocery store nearby said that, judging by the number of people who use the boardwalk, it must have cost about $10,000 per user.

Well, I use it. I eat lunch down there if I can arrive before the wind kicks up. Sometimes, afterwords, I walk south along the bay shore on a concrete path that ends at our last operating lumber mill, passing a lot of freight cars around the way. Scenic? No.

And that's where I met Buzzard. The song tells the rest. Typically, my songwriting involves a good measure of fiction. This one is the exception, every word is true.

I played all the instruments and sang. Eric helped out a lot with the time signatures, driving the song with his drums.

I wrote this when I was 20 or 21, somewhere near the end of my undergraduate career. It was my second acoustic piece. The first one is actually more difficult to play, but I like this one better. At some point I realized that good music didn't always have to be challenging. I was walking around humming the main melody in my head, and it suddenly dawned on me that this was how songs get written. Oh to be young again.

My musical diet as a child was very much based around classical music, some soft pop, and plenty of hymns. As a teen I discovered rock (it was a good historical period to discover rock) and noticed that a lot of bands I liked were putting acoustic instrumentals on their albums.

I don't know when I first realized I was a closet 'American' music fan. I know, I know, jazz and rock are American ideas too. But I am thinking more in the bluegrass/country/folk vein. It's a style I really admire for the human quality of the notes and the great storytellers who play them.

Anyway, this one is just me playing Tami, my ancient and venerable cheapo Korean Ovation six-string. But that's another story.

This song was written after driving a girlfriend from my home on the southern Oregon coast to the Seattle airport. It takes about 8 hours if you push it. I suppose a real madman could do it in 6 hours, but the title 'Seven Hours' seemed just about right.

If you aren't from around these parts, you can get out a road atlas and trace our progress from my home town up to Seattle.

After dropping her off, I turned right around and headed back again. It comes to about 16 hours of driving, more than the law allows for professional drivers and definitely something not to be repeated.

The rest of the song is pure fiction. I considered the story effective when my brother inquired about what inspired the song in a very concerned tone. For the record, I don't use or sell illegal drugs. Anyone care for a cigar and some Scotch?

This was the first project Eric and I did in the new studio, and we consider it one of our finest efforts. It was a one-evening session. Eric did more on this piece than anything we have collaborated on before. It's a real statement about how far he has come as a musician. He played all the solos, the bass line, and the drums. And he produced the superb sound effects. I wrote the lyrics, sang, and played the two guitar parts.

I played this one on Tami using the same slide I've had since I was 15, sawed off the end of a chrome tent peg. Eric chipped in with some really nice brush work and a tambourine that was perfect. I also added a little Hammond organ to the B-sections. It was all one live take, singing and everything, and I think that's the way it should be.

Alonza Latta was raised in Lake Arthur, New Mexico during the Great Depression. He often said that his family was dirt poor but they had no idea it was true. Their house wouldn't have passed modern building codes, but it kept them warm. The cows and chickens and gardens and beehives kept them full.

He eloped with Grace Lantz at age 22 (his father wasn't so good at pushing the fledglings from the nest) and somehow ended up in central Oregon. From there, a series of construction jobs took him all over the Pacific Northwest, where he bluffed his way into a career operating heavy machinery.

As the stork kept increasing the family size, the desire to settle down grew stronger. He took a job with the post office in Redmond, farming 80 acres in his spare time. His faithful church service and basketball skill kept him busy. He also loved to build, modify, and create furniture and machines, with mixed success.

Retirement brought him to the Oregon coast, where he fished for salmon commercially for many years. His greenhouse window was always filled with cactus, orchids, and other beautiful plants. He lost his wife of more than 50 years, but kept active with volleyball and concrete work (doing the heavy lifting) well into his 70s.

After his second try at being a bachelor stretched to ten years, he decided to relive his youth by eloping for a second time. His old accquaintance and second wife was his faithful companion when he finally succumbed to cancer after a five years.

His kindness, generosity, work ethic, humor, and vigor were legendary. There won't be another man like him any time soon, who accomplished so much, with such grace, and shared it with so many. I'm priviledged beyond kings to have called him "Grandpa".

This is the only love song I've ever written without a woman in mind. It's also my best. Psychologists, your mission is clear.

I was really interested in writing a love song that had some kind of story or structure beyond the usual sap. So I imagined an intense and painful journey, traversing hostile climates and terrain, to get to that special someone. And I decided it should all happen in the space of a day, too. That's a lot of metaphors and images but I'm really happy with how they fit together.

Eric definitely knows how to rock, you can feel him driving this song with the cymbals. My former business partner served as recording engineer for this track, in the old studio. After the basic tracks were done, he thought it was really boring and repetitive. But the final layers of vocals brought him around. Kids! I sang and played everything except the drums.

Maybe

Seven Steps

The Story's Over

I've Been Bad

Craze