Tonight I stayed in and tried to work on a new song I began writing last week. When I say work, I mean write the lyrics, which are always the hardest part. I’ve had people tell me that they don’t find that part of songwriting difficult, but I never have the heart to tell them that their lyrics are nails-on-a-chalk-board awful. The song is ironically called ‘Give me the fight I’m looking for’ and after ‘This grenade will love you’ is my most personal.

I poured myself a glass of my favorite (high-end, Goose Island IPA is low end) beer Southern Tier Un*Earthly IPA and lay my head on my desk and closed my eyes. I was hoping my brain would throw me something but instead it put me back in school when I was 14 years old. I was in music class, my teacher, aptly named Mary Melody (unless you had her for German, which she also thought) would ask us to lay our heads on our desks so we could let our minds ‘float away’ while she played us classical music. I had heard music before, but this was the first time I actually heard it. Although she was not a particularly popular teacher, I always remembered those 40 minutes each day of taking a break from the usual classes to listen to music in a small portacabin under the tall chestnut trees a short walk from the main building.

When I first heard music, this is what I fell in love with. Felix Mendelssohn – Fingal’s Cave