Foreword

It's been a long time since I've written anything about these songs. I used to demo things all the time, and I'd always write up a song-summary for everything on a given set of demos--even if I'd demoed it before.  It got a little tedious, especially because I'm well noted for being long-winded.  I kind of stopped doing it altogether.  But, when it comes to the Internet, content is content...so here we go.  Once more, into the breech... I'll try to keep it brief this time.

Fall Apart

Probably one of the first Christian songs I ever wrote.  People still seem to like it.  At the time, I was mostly writing stuff about things ending.  This one was written out of my own sense of change and also from things I'd heard Rich Mullins say in interviews.  At the time, I probably wanted to BE Rich Mullins.  But, I don't think I'm that person anymore.  Song's still good, though.  I guess at it's heart, it's just about the concept of faith, hope, and love being the greatest gifts of God, and that as long as we have those, nothing else matters.  I get why people still like this song, because I still identify with it myself in a lot of ways.  I don't necessarily think "everything is passing away" anymore, but I do think that if it is, God is still good. 

So...yeah... Told you I'd be brief.

Stranger

Still one of my favorites that I've written.  Vaguely Pearl-Jammy in its main riff. Lyrics that are just vague enough to be meaningful. And it was one of my first experiments in "now the song gets LOUD!"

I've probably said a bunch of different stuff regarding the meaning of the song.  I do that. At the moment, I think it's mostly a metaphor about how we're all strangers wandering this Earth, looking for our home--home being Heaven, of course.  It's written more or less through the eyes of a drifter.  Probably a dying one.  I'm not really sure.  There's always been a dark-side to my writing, so I'd like to think it's here too...but even in that, I think there's some hope.  It's a song about GOING home, after all.  So, I guess in the end, the guy dies and goes to Heaven.  That's not so bad.

Battle Cry

I wrote an Irish drinking song and set Christian lyrics to it, basically.  In hindsight, I wish I hadn't made this a Christian song.  I'd really like to play it in bars and whatnot...but I have an aversion to being booed for my lyrical content.  I still like it, but I go back and forth on whether or not I'm comfortable calling myself a "Christian Artist" in the first place, so this kind of falls into that problem.

The lyric is based on the idea that if there's anything worth fighting for, it's that Jesus is Lord.  I dug the "Jesus is alive" part a lot when I first wrote it.  I still kind of do.  I think I sometimes try a little bit too hard to disguise my point in some of my songs.  I use metaphors and stories to hide theological points sometimes.  It's a lot more bold to just come right out and SAY that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and is the means of salvation.  I did that in this song, and I'm pretty proud of that.  So...y'know...I've got mixed emotions on this one. Love the music, though...and I got to use my hammered dulcimer on it.  First time I'd ever really done that for something meant for wide-release.  (I'd also played it on an old Uncle Dick demo, but that went nowhere...quickly, too.)

A Song for Friendship

I wrote this one when I thought I was losing an important friendship in my life.  (Things ended up working out, but it looked pretty bleak at the time.)  I've lost a few friends over the years for different reasons, and my usual response would be to get enormously pissed off at the person and trash them every chance I got.  For some reason, though, I didn't feel like that with the person in this song.  Instead, I decided I wanted to remember the good times and wish the person well.  I took the "adult" route.  That may be why the friendship lasted.

Interesting to note that this one was meant to be a lot more "folky" than it turned out being in the final mix.  Nikomas added the drums, and it became a rock song.  I'm glad it did...but I keep forgetting about it.  I play this one in my solo sets with just my acoustic a lot.  When I hear the version on the record, it sometimes takes me a few seconds to recognize it!  That's kind of cool. (It also makes me wish I gigged with a full band more often.)  Sometime down the road, I may record a more acoustic version of it, just for kicks.  But for now...this one remains one of my favorites from the record.

Everything

It's a love song, clearly.  I don't think about it too much, to be honest with you.  I wrote it, recorded it, and walked away.  But people seem to really like it.  It's one of the songs most mentioned to me as being a favorite among those who know all my stuff.  One person even used the word "poignant" when referring to it.  That's nice.  In fact, Nikomas even danced with his wife to it shortly after I gave him his preview copy of the record.  That's one of the better compliments I could get on something I wrote.

I struggle with writing love songs.  I feel like they get cliche pretty quickly. I can deal with broken-hearted songs.  Those (as the country-folk say) "somebody did somebody wrong songs." I get that.  Love songs, though, I wrestle with as a writer.  I guess it’s because every relationship I've ever had has been so phenomenally screwed up that I don’t know how to talk about things in a positive light.  Or maybe I'm just not as creative as I'd like to think I am...

Nonetheless, I kind of feel like I got it right on this one...but I feel like I got it righter on the record that followed, with "Off My Feet."

Wish I Could Tell You

This is also kind of a love song...but it's more of a HOPELESS love song, which comes easier to me.  I have no idea where the musical inspiration came from, though.  I actually might not be able to play it right now, if someone handed me a guitar and asked me to do so.  It's a kind of complicated part with some weird chords.  I hadn't listened to this one much until I did the audio commentary (available elsewhere on this site), but I really enjoyed it when I heard it.

I don't really know what else to say about this one, except that recording the drums was fun.  As my memory goes, and Nikomas may dispute this, it took about three tries.  The first try wasn’t right.  The second try was closer.  On the third, I said something like "play a disco beat" (and I referenced some worship song we played together at church) and he got it in one take after that.

...but that's the only memory I really have associated with this one anymore.

AMB4

It's instrumental, so I don't have much to say about it.  People always ask what the title means, though, so I'll talk about that at least.  At the time, I was in the habit of giving riffs "working titles," which I would later replace with a proper title.  I'd named this one "AMB4" after a setting on a processor I'd been using. " Ambience #4," I believe it was called.  I used to say I didn't remember what it meant, but I recently found some old notes that reminded me.  I'd only written one part with the "Ambience" setting and then kind of abandoned the effect.  Song sat around long enough that when I eventually did complete it, I'd forgotten why it was called that, but I still liked it as a title for whatever reason.

Awkward part, though, was that I have a good friend named Amanda whose initials happen to be "A. M. B." So I had some explaining to do, there. Completely not about her...not that she isn't lovely.  I really dig the electric part in it.  If I did it NOW, I'd probably play it slightly cleaner.  Still distorted, but less effects.  But it's one of my favorite instrumentals I've written and I think this version holds up.

Moments

I wrote this after a late night of coffee and conversation with a friend I hadn't seen in a long while (and come to think of it, as of Feb 2009 I haven't seen her since, though we've e-mailed).  It was a good night and a lot of fun for me.  At the same time, it was one of those "we’ll do this again real soon (yeah, right)" moments.  Not that we don't enjoy each other's company, but it's difficult to see each other, mostly due to geography.  Still, I was glad to see her that night, so I wrote this song.

There are a couple of interesting things from the recording of this tune.  I wrote and recorded it in the same night.  The guitar (my Grandpa's 1930 Gibson) was in a really weird tuning that I can't even recall.  The shaker was played by me.  I did it just like it were any demo I might do for my own sake and it made it onto the record.  It was a VERY last minute addition, as I sent out the CD for replication the next morning!  If you asked me to play it now, I probably couldn't even remember the tuning of the guitar, much less the chord structure...so this one has not only never been performed live, it probably never WILL be, either.  Good song, though.  I like it.

One Man

Used to do this one in my old punk band, Uncle Dick.  I always used to say, "We played a lot, but we never got it right." I guess I kind of meant it.  I'd meant for it to be more acoustic and bluesy...maybe even a harmonica.  Then the band got its hands on it and it became a fast, loud, punk song.  Somehow, when I went to record it on my own record, I didn't get it right there, either.  Heh.  (Maybe I'll do another version one of these days.)

The song's meaning is kind of a multiple choice. It's almost a Christian tune.  I even mention Jesus...but my brother (the singer in Uncle Dick) probably described it best.  He said it was about finding your path in life; that we all find our own way and it's not the same as anyone else's.  I guess that’s it.  Mostly I was just looking for words that rhymed and contradicted each other.  I'm not sure it was ever about anything.  Nonetheless, it was always one of my favorite Uncle Dick songs, and when it became apparent that the band was no longer going to be staying together, I moved it over to the solo set.

Diner

I like this one a lot.  It's one of the few from this record that I think hold up in my "new" way of writing.  I like this version, too. I sound a bit like Pete Townshend.  I played it on my (1950) Silvertone, I think.  It was either that or my Strat.  I don’t recall.  I should really write these things down. I do remember that I ran a line directly in through an "amp modeler" made by Line 6.  That probably doesn’t mean much to anyone...but I did.

The song itself is kind of a parable.  It's based around a game I sometimes play when I’m sitting in a diner/sub shop and there's only a couple of people around.  If someone's sitting there by him/herself I make up life-stories for them.  I started doing that after the character of Joe Dick did it in the movie "Hard Core Logo." In fact, I stole some lines from that movie for this lyric. In this case, it's an old man with a back-story of having hit the bottle after his wife died and he's just getting older and older, but still frequenting the same diner.

Could be about anyone, though.  We're all the same to the waiters...we just come in, eat, pay (hopefully), and leave. There's something beautiful about that.  Don't quite know what it is...

Wonderful

Okay...I have no idea what this is about, and if I did the record today, it wouldn't be on there.  There are parts of it that I like...but I have no idea what the hell I was talking about, and it's musically inconsistent.  Plus, it's in a weird tuning that I can't easily replicate live.  If you like it, that's cool...but if not, then I agree with you.  Let's just move on.

He Is...

I still think of this as one of the best Christian songs I've written.  I think it does probably the best job of describing "grace" out of my Christian writing.  I drew inspiration from Brennan Manning's "The Ragamuffin Gospel" to write it and also from the book of Revelation.  I like the notion that the church will finally be all it was supposed to be when we reach Heaven and that the divisions we've come up with on Earth will finally be gone.  I also like that there is at least strong indication that there will be a bunch of people there that you might not expect to be there.  That's reassuring.

I don't really have any "studio" stories for this one...except that this is one I stole a guitar for.  Nikomas had gone out of town on a mission trip toAfrica.  At the time, we worked at the same church and shared an office. I guess because he thought it would be "safe" there, he left his Taylor guitar sitting in the office.  I'd never played a Taylor , so I--ahem--borrowed it.  Funny thing is, a couple of years later, the guitar was dropped and it broke, so it is no more...but it's preserved forever, thanks to me.  (By the way...stuff like that is why I'm a Martin man.  I've dropped both of my Martins and didn't so much as dent them.  Suck on that, Taylor!)

Beautiful

I like this one a lot, too.  I used to think this would be the song I ALWAYS played at gigs.  It isn't, though.  I haven't played it in some time...but I still like it. If nothing else, people occasionally sing it to me, when they're trying to name songs of mine they like.  That's a pretty big compliment.

It's another song about grace, really.  I think that's one of the best things about God; his unconditional love.  They way he takes people who pretty much are deserving of nothing but Hell and cleans them up.  God's never met anyone he thought was ugly.  Oh, sure, you've got your Hitlers and your Anton Laveys...but God still looks at them and sees them how he MADE them to be.  It's not his fault that they reject him...he still thinks they're beautiful.  It's only a pity they keep turning down God's offer of salvation.

...there's some metaphor/parallel I could draw there between that and every hot girl who's ever shot me down...but let's avoid that.

In the studio, I ended up adding a lot more layers to this than I ever had thought of putting on.  I don't really know why.  Just did.  I listened to it recently to do the "commentary" posted elsewhere on the website.  I was shocked at how much stuff was going on in the music.  I'd forgotten all about it.  I still liked it, though.  Still, I think this one deserves the full-on acoustic treatment sooner or later. Maybe that's future web-content. Or maybe it's something I'll mention here and then completely forget about.  Time will tell.

Closing Remarks:

"Grounds" keeps being good to me, even though there's a lot I'd do differently now.  Sometimes, when I'm sitting around with a guitar, I'll play some of these songs and think of re-doing them, now that I have a better sense of who I am as a writer/performer. As cool as that might be though, I would hate to take away the magic of a record that's served me so well.  It's still a good listen, even with the mistakes.  Maybe I shouldn't have left so many of them in...or maybe that's what makes it good.  Your call...but me?  I dig it.

Thanks for listening to it for so long.

-Derek
(Mostly) February 2009