Past Blogs:

    It Was A Long Way To Fall (1.3.08)

    Stories...Available on CD Baby (12.6.07)

    What's been going on? (12.21.06)

    Playing at the Canvas (8.26.06)

    Thoughts On The Bistro (8.10.06)

January 3, 2008

It Was a Long Way to Fall

If you can’t tell by my blogs, I love to write songs.  I think there is such power in being able to tell a story through words.  Putting music to words helps me to say what I’m feeling.  I usually start with a musical idea.  Music is my emotional canvas and the words are the pictures I paint on that canvas.  Sometimes the words come first for me, but usually it is the music that I start with which then allows me to say what I am feeling.

“It Was a Long Way to Fall” is the first song on my CD, “Stories From the Abyss”.  It was also the last song I wrote out of all the songs on my CD.  It’s a song of relief.  When you are in the middle of something it’s hard to see things from a distance.  It’s only with time that I am able to see what has happened to me and what I have learned from an event or time in my life.  “It Was a Long Way to Fall” is a song about being able to see the big picture.  Most of the other songs on my CD, with the exception of “Don’t Count on It Baby”, are songs about struggling in the moment and dealing with the moment.  “It Was a Long Way to Fall” sums up what it is like for me to make it to the other side of something and to see it for what it really was.

I think when you go through change it is a scary experience, even if you know it is the right thing or even the best thing for you.  It’s never easy to risk and step out of what is normal or comfortable in life.  Without taking risks you never learn and never grow as a person.  Sometimes change is a choice.  Breaking up with someone is an example.  If someone cheats on you, you may still love them but at the same time know that you can’t be with them and need to end the relationship.  Other times change is forced on us.  Your boss fires you.  Someone dies.  You get dumped and didn’t see it coming. 

You go through so many emotions in the moment when things you counted on change.  Anger, sadness, denial, bargaining, acceptance, are some of those things.  When you work through those emotions you’re able to come out the other side.  I use the word image of a tunnel to describe how that experience has felt to me.  It was a tunnel that I had to go through.  There is no other way to go.  I had to travel through it.  And when I made it through those feelings it happened so suddenly it felt like falling until I saw the light.  At that moment I saw the experience for what it truly meant to me.  There was such a feeling of relief like a summer day where the sun warms your body, your mind, your heart again.  There is also a feeling of hope and that everything is possible after you have reached rock bottom.

In the same way when you go through change you are never the same.  That’s the third verse.  I am a changed man never to be the same.  What I’ve gone through in my life hasn’t gone extinct, its now a part of who I am and makes me the person that I am.  And just because I have seen things for what they truly are doesn’t mean that there will be times that I will choose to forget.  Notice the word “choose”.  I know I chose to ignore what I know.  Sometimes I need to do that to get through the day.  Other times I’m choosing not to learn and grow by ignoring what I know.  That can be a huge problem for me, especially when I make the same mistake twice and see the event as making “no sense” even though I know full well why I did it deep down inside. 

The last verse of “It Was a Long Way to Fall” is about the fear of changing.  I am not afraid of change.  I am not afraid of being scared.  It makes me a better person to admit those feelings and learn from my experiences so that I am no longer afraid and scared.  Often times my own need to be perfect keeps me from experiencing those feelings.  I often have to get over the lie that I can be perfect or that I should be perfect.  I can’t always get it right and I don’t need to be unhappy by holding on to that lie that I can.  Perfection will never happen and I have to let go of it in order to be happy. 

I started this blog entry about how I love to write songs.  I just spent hundreds of words to explain the experience of a song.  I used far less words to describe the same experience in “It Was a Long Way to Fall.”  I think the song says it so much better as well as saying so much more.  The music is the unspeakable word.  It too speaks to a feeling.  The music is a feeling that can not be described by words.  It’s the foundation for me.  Without those unspeakable words of the music the versus would have never existed as well as the song as a whole.