Goodbye Spain

Shameless self-promotion time!  Before “Goodbye Spain”, I had always written songs with my own lyrics.  It’s not that I wasn’t open to writing songs with other lyrics but the thought never occured to me.  Then one day, I came across my good old friend Sam West’s blog, which he used to post his own poetry and lyrics every once in a while, and that was where I read lyrics of his called “Goodbye Spain”.  The words spoke of a longing to get out of a smalltown, and though Vancouver isn’t a smalltown by any means, I could still relate to the lonely, outsider feeling of the poem’s tone.  In fact, I was so impressed and liked the lyrics so much that I asked Sam if I could write a song with them and once I was given the OK, I got to work on them.  First collaboration!  Woot!

For a while, I couldn’t come up with much.  Most of the time when I write, I’ll either have the music for the verse or the chorus down, but not for both, and I usually just get frustrated.  With “Goodbye Spain”, it was the same thing: I had music for the verses all set but nothing really came to mind for a chorus.  Eventually, I somehow managed to crank something out, and the next thing I knew, I was singing the song walking down the street, thinking to myself, “Damn!  That’s actually a pretty awesome song.” (rather than, “Damn!  I must seem like a crazy person right now, singing in public about highway A1A.”

I don’t have a studio version recording of the track yet, but I’ve performed it a bunch of times in live and this is my favourite performance.  Enjoy!

Dream 6

Well, I had the worst nightmare: performing and screwing it up like never before.

I somehow found myself at the old Myles of Beans cafe where I used to perform.  In my dream, it was the last day, before the cafe closed (it’s closed now.  I don’t know why…) and I was invited by Wes, the resident musician in charge of open mic nights.  He invited me up to the stage and I sat down at the piano with my back to the audience (which you’re not supposed to do and even in real life, the piano was turned sideways so people could see you).  So there I sat, staring at the wall with the audience behind me while I talked into the mic about random things and the people behind me laughed as if I were a comedian.

This went on for a few minutes until I realized what I was there to do: play music.  So I said, “I should better get playing” and proceeded to play a song (I don’t remember which one).  But there wasn’t a mic for me to sing into and my words were barely heard over the piano.  So I suddenly stopped playing and asked Wes if I could get a mic which was nearby.  He gave it to me and I started playing again and for whatever reason, I kept screwing up everything: the piano, the words, the singing.  Everything was going wrong, not to mention it seemed to take me forever to finish the song.

Finally, I was done but I still wanted to play one song well to show everyone that I wasn’t some idiot.  Out of all my songs, I figured I knew how to play “Goodbye Spain” the best (also I had just played it a few hours before I went to bed).  So I did that, except somehow the microphone was on the other side of the piano again and I just thought, “Fuck it!  I’ll sing without the mic” and proceeded to then sing-shout the song overtop of the piano.

That’s all I remember.  God, I hope that doesn’t actually happen to me.  *shudder*