A lot of my music, like a lot of my writing in general, has a religious or spiritual theme. This song is no exception to the rule.
Category Archives: Music
I write a lot of different styles of music, but I have yet to share any country & western. A couple of weeks back, one of my friends asked if I liked country music and whether I’d ever written a country song. I like country as much as anything else (which means, I like the best of it, and generally despise the worst of it) and I have written several country songs. But, those songs were all written years ago, and there was a funny country tune bouncing around in my head that I decided was more contemporary.
So, I recorded that one. And, here it is: You’re So Odd (I Just Can’t Even).
Just to let you know that I’m still not dead, here’s a little original Halloween music for your fright night delight!
I usually post music on Mondays, but today is a special occasion. One month ago today, I posted a philosophical piece on trust, based on the concept of four plus one. Today is the plus one of that timeline.
This original song is a culmination of a common theme in my music of angelic comfort and misplaced trust, from the triumphalist pop musings of To Make You Free to the dark tragedy of Breakdown.
I hope you enjoy and share In the Shadow of the Tree.
I’ve posted some rough songs lately for Music Monday. A song about suicide, a song about depravation, a song about anger and revenge, a song about murder.
Today, I attempt to make up for this long stretch of tragedy with a soft jazz tune on acoustic guitar, a poetic Sunday afternoon road trip around small town America.
I hope you enjoy Ration.
This particular video took a while because I wanted the imagery to be just right, so that it wasn’t just a string of lyrics. I’ve done those before, but I felt this song deserved more. The minimalist and monochrome animation I hope captures the mood of the song.
Below is Breakdown, an indie rock song I wrote about 10 years ago.
Perfect my theories, and then I’m going to run to the Wild.
When I was in the Navy, I was in a rock band named Draft in Augusta, Georgia. That’s me on the left, playing lead guitar. Adam Pearson was the lead vocalist, Josh Johnson (out of frame on the right) was bassist, and Eric Booher was on drums.
Eric and I had previously been a banjo-and-guitar folk duo called The Drunken Sailors in San Angelo, Texas. It was a fun romp.
Draft played primarily cover tunes, but we had a couple of originals. One of them I recorded after the band broke up, a rock tune about crime and rebellion called Garden.
I hope you enjoy it!
Studying Islám at university, it struck me how saturated American popular culture is with imagery from various religions, Western, Eastern, Pagan, whatever. And, I don’t mean religious imagery used for its original sense, but used to illustrate some sentiment in everyday life. It shows the way these images get into our hearts and minds when we talk about feeling like we’re wandering in the desert, or turned away from the inn, or rolling the stone up the hill.
But, I could not think of a single example of American popular culture that included imagery from Islám this way. Being a songwriter, I wondered what such an example might sound like, not a Muslim song but a song that employed some imagery from Islám to illustrate some sense of feeling lost or trapped like the Hebrews in the desert, or Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, or Sysiphus in Hell.
At that time, I was fasting in solidarity with my Muslim classmates. In fact, several of us Christians were doing this after spending the first day of Ramadán gently teasing our Muslim friends by bringing colas and potato chips to class. If you’ve never done this, you should, even if you don’t personally know any Muslims. It’s a lot harder than Lent, let me tell you. A real learning experience.
And, from that experience came Forever Ramadán, a song of a fast that seemingly will never end. I don’t mean for this song to reduce the holy month practiced by the global Ummah to the existential suffering of an individual, but to show how imagery from Islám can stand alongside imagery from other religions in popular culture, deepening our understanding of how the great resonates in the small.
Once upon a time, I had a dream of putting together a tribute band to do metal and hard rock covers of classic reggae tunes, heavy on the Bob Marley. And, then, I had another dream of putting together a tribute band to do reggae covers of metal and hard rock tunes. I was particularly intrigued about doing a bouncy islands remake of Metallica’s Enter Sandman.
Neither of those dreams came to its fruition (Police reference!) but below is an example of how I would redo a Marley classic for a rock audience. Enjoy!