Unlike light in all its glory,
a song can walk through walls
or cross quiet battlefields like soft bullets
into the hearts of forgotten brothers.
A song may choose angels
or ditch bottles in the wind
humming amber hymns.
Songs find the seams of morning dreams
reminding you of deepest loves,
deepest needs.
A song sneaks up in a lonely land with a laughing embrace
and whispers behind the ear,
Come old friend, let's sit a while
Let's smile again.
© 2020 Elliott Park
Melodies come into the world in many ways. I’ve had the most beautiful melodies come to me seemingly divine, through dreams or the twilights of dreams. Sometimes they arrive through the white noise of rolled down car window, or by the rhythm of pavement seams on a long drive. Some just pop into my head, usually at the least convenient times. Then there are the laymen melodies, who are generally good sport and offer themselves for any old lyrical idea - they come by less mysterious ways, typically by hours of sitting at the piano trying new things until something interesting happens. Last count I had close to 600 melodies, all waiting for lyric assignment. I do sometimes feel guilty that these poor things must wait so long, sometimes years. I especially feel bad for those that came in such angelic ways - now having to sit and wait along with the average toot-lee-doos and dum-dee-dums and old nameless waltzes who bide the time with chess games, no longer even looking up when the door opens. But all melodies arrive naive to their purpose and ready to adapt, if necessary, to their soon-to-be partners for life: the lyrics. Sometimes though not so soon.
Here’s the story of one melody in particular.
Three years ago the most intoxicating little marching melody arrived at the doorstep of my mind. He had his lead sheet, his license to inspire, everything in order. The smile on his young face was half the song. To be real and honest, I can’t actually remember how the melody came, but given the feel of it it was probably after hearing one of my old school classic favs, on the local classical station, probably while driving. Probably Ravel as some will immediately recognize. But here was this little guy. And it just felt best to give him his first trial run into the real air accompanied by my daughters and our ukulele. Sometimes the girls don’t oblige, but this time they did.
Traitor Heart Conception - Listen Here!
I recorded this on my phone. And what I ALWAYS do is email these recordings to myself, so that they are safe in my email server, at least until I catalogue them later. For whatever reason I didn’t email it. I forgot to. A few weeks later my phone was charging at my parents house and Dad brushed up against the wire. It slipped off the counter and slapped the tile floor hard facedown.
No big loss. I was due for an update anyway. But when I got a new one I failed to transfer or save some of the audio recordings thinking I’d emailed them to myself. I have to say, I’m an absolute rough idea cataloging zealot. These ideas are caches of gold. The flashes of potential I’ve always thought of as sparks of lightning fire to cavemen - God-given beginnings of emotional sustenance and warmth, and my own evolution as a songwriter. They don’t happen often enough and when the strike occurs you drop your flint hide- scraper and you make a tar sludge torch... and you carry that flame like your firstborn until it is safely saved and backed up as a bed of coals on the cave floor.
Three years later (and this is literally five days ago at the time of this blog) I am desperately seeking one more solid track for a kids album. The album had great songs but needed that 12th man - that secret ingredient to add some charm. I was searching through my roughs trying to find any old recording that I might have made of the bedtime songs I used to sing for my kids, possibly for a hidden track. Anything really. And then I thought, well just maybe there’s one on that old cracked phone. For some reason I’d kept it in the back of my desk drawer. Pam somehow found a prehistoric charger in another drawer, and I plugged it in and waited........... Can I just say. These devices. As frustrated as I get daily with them, they are truly amazing. It lit up, wide-eyed and ready to dumb down my brain again, as if it had never left us. It’s little shaded rounded app icons. So 2014.
Carefully thumbing across glass shards, within a few seconds I was in my old audio files again. I didn’t find that hidden track candidate. But I did find that little marching melody. Back to the beginning of this blog entry. Songwriters are sometimes terrible matchmakers. These melodies and these lyrics, all desiring their perfect mate for life, don’t always start off with the right partner. When I heard that little melody, the lyrics of another song I had written since, immediately ran to my frontal lobe and fell hard and deep into lovely rhythm with this young march.
There was nothing I could do. I was witnessing an all-out lyric/melody affair in broad daylight. And I let it happen. When you’re trying to get an album done you kinda look the other way on things like this. I’m NOT looking forward to the slow walk with the other abandoned melody, back to the waiting room with the old waltzes and simple country boys. He’ll understand though, and agree whole-heartedly. These melodies are a reasonable and patient species. I love them every one.
So... here is the new marriage:
Thank you for visiting my site and indulging me with this blog. I’ll try to do more entries. The complete song and full kids album will be available for pre-order on June 8th. By the way when I say kids I mean of all ages :)
From the north the killing force arrives
Winter stars extinguished from the sky
Arctic wind spreads death across the plains
Cold gray hands embalming every vein
Of all the nights fate chooses this bleak night
To birth a beast into the cruelest plight
Lying there in shock and bare extreme
From safe warm womb to freezing misery
Suffering. Struggling. Trembling tightly curled
In roaring gale his feeble bleats unheard
Accepting this as only newborns can
A fight for life within death’s crushing hand
A flaw in nature, logic might suggest
Bringing life into a night like this
Where grizzled bison bawl with primal fear
A cold this country hasn’t seen in years
The eldest know the only way to hide
Lie still and let it bury you alive
Short and shallow panting through the nose
Lungs will ache wheezing frothy foam
The dim gray dawn brings forth an abstract sight
Monsters rising slowly from the ice
Mother beckons babe to try and stand
He wobbles up and falls back down again
The thirsty herd begins to walk away
She nudges him to try and stand again
She knows if left alone there’s little time
Wolves have quite the taste for left behinds
He tries again but one leg has gone lame
The foot half froze will never be the same
With healthy legs a trial this act would be
The scrapper slowly rises on just three
Finally up and sucking warm white life
Muzzle thrusting drinking with delight
Standing strong this little tripod form
Quite the fighter is our winterborn
The lessons of the killing months are learned
Within his supple mind the cold is burned
His temperament imprinted from the herd
Less playful, more quiet and reserved
He learns to taste the air for hint of steam
Rising from the flowing saving spring
He notes the first warm brush of southern wind
The scent of side-oats written deep within
Some calves are born in summer, most in spring
They play their first few days in waves of green
Thin and tender skin of little strife
Biting flies their greatest strain of life
But now and then a birth in winter months
Brought forth on the far side of the sun
And these rare few, often stunted souls
Flaws in nature, reason might propose
But nature always proves her methods sound
To every glitch she gives a work around
A strength for every curse she often deeds
As tempered steel doused in great extreme
Behold the scrapper now a massive beast
Out in front, standing in the lead
To cold and thirst his herd may soon succumb
The ceaseless storm has drove them lost and numb
He turns his head his nostrils twitch and flare
Tasting every atom in the air
Testing ice-dried wind for wisps of wet
Taking any hope that he can get
He starts one way then makes a gentle veer
A thousand beasts trusting where he steers
A mile wide trail of hoof churned earth and snow
The rumbling crunching mass of mammals go
To liquid life and maybe winter grass
Today the fate of death they’ll just slip past
And death recalls this beast with gimpy gate
The one that long ago somehow escaped
This one from whom death took the stinging jilt
Who rose up on three legs to reach his milk
Then grew to fight and earn his rightful claim
This quiet beast the winter wind has named
——
Some are born in summer, some in spring
Spending sunny days in love and ease
Tender skins as young ones ought to have
Spirits on the smooth and well-lit path
If you are a soul that fate has cursed
That winter winds have buried deep in hurt
Left for dead trembling cold and lame
Perhaps a greater purpose calls your name
You might just be the one that nature formed
To lead the hurting masses through their storms
The one that death regards with seething scorn
The mighty one the wind calls Winterborn