ericprincessdragon

Tag: life

  • Ring Any Bells

    In our song-a-week group there are no rules about what we can submit each week other than it cannot be a previously completed song. Otherwise anything goes – an instrumental, a set of lyrics, a one minute acapella sketch or a fully fleshed out five minute production. The point is simply to write and submit something new. But in week four of the fall 2024 group, Tim brought a surprise. That Monday he sent this:

    “Here’s something I’ve always wanted to try — this week, we’re all going to write a song with the same title. I opened one of the internet’s finest random phrase generators, clicked ‘generate’ and it gave me, ‘Ring Any Bells?’ as in ‘recalling a memory; causing a person to remember something or someone.’ At the end of this week, we’ll have 14 different versions of a song called ‘Ring Any Bells?’ I vowed not to spend too much time searching for the perfect song title. This is what the void has bestowed upon us. Rejoice and be glad.”

    I was blindsided – I was already working on the song I intended to finish that week – but I took on the challenge just as many others would. My first reaction was that the title felt a bit too cliché for my taste. But I’ve found before that constraints can push you somewhere you wouldn’t have landed on your own – I talked about this in the Maytag Land entry – and this was no different. I sat with it through Monday and eventually my mind landed on past lives, which sent me back to a memory of a gal who once told me she’d had a vision of us together in a past life, in which we had held some importance. In her vision we were a king and queen and ruling together long ago. Then, as hippies do, we performed a crystal ritual in the back of a van to verify the vision. The results were inconclusive.

    I’m skeptical of past life recall – I haven’t heard anything particularly compelling to suggest we’d carry memories across lifetimes, and personally I don’t have any indication of having lived before this one. That said, I’ve lived enough of this life to feel like I’ve had several in one. I find the territory interesting to write from. This was also a period where I was reading and thinking a lot about death, mortality, and the nature of consciousness – you can see that thread running through Fallen Giant and Undertow.

    I wove in some core memories from my own childhood – sitting out in the sunny front lawn pulling petals one by one, she loves me, she loves me not, and an old birthday photo – then let myself wander into fantastical territory, imagining past lives, ancient temples, a kind of epic and magical existence I can’t claim to remember. It was a fun departure before returning to my earliest memories of this life, which are not particularly epic or magical – watching too much TV, playing video games, playing in the yard. From there back to the present, musing on the possibilities of a distant life and ultimately landing with focus and gratitude on the simple things we have today – a vision, a dream, a conversation, a connection.

    It’s quite a different type of song than what I normally write, and I’m grateful the challenge of the title pushed me there. I wouldn’t have found this one on my own. Not everyone in the group took on the title that week but in the end this was just one of ten songs written around the title “Ring Any Bells”. I always enjoy listening to the submissions and reading lyrics every week but that week was particularly interesting, what with the collective bell ringin’ and all. I’d like to share some quotes from other submission emails:

    “I gotta admit, when I read your assignment I definitely said, ‘(sigh of exasperation) goddamnit, Tim’, but I made myself have an open mind and I actually had fun with this.” — Theresa Bird

    “I too was chafing a little bit this week with the assignment but it kind of put the screws on me in a good way.” — Lazarus Pearl

    “It made me nervous and excited, which I enjoy leaning into. The lyrical theme constraint made me musically constrain as well.” — Micha Silvius

    “I love hearing all the different creations generated from the same seedling of an idea. I feel like it also pushes me to write my best songs because I know there are listeners on the other side who are going to really dig into my songs because they are songwriters themselves. It adds a little pressure to sort of bring my A-game.” — Jack Isenhart

    Here’s my “Ring Any Bells”

    You say you remember what came before
    What you stored in the core when you were four
    Before picking daisies and tearing them apart
    Saying he loves me he loves me not
    Before the melancholy gaze you gave
    That camera on your birthday

    Were you something else entirely?
    Were you the first to crawl up out of the sea?
    Seems like something you would do
    Were you a cloud before the sky turned blue?
    And whatever you were
    Were we together?

    Tell me does this ring any bells?
    Am I on the right track? Have I gone too far back?

    Yes you say you had a vision of me
    In an ancient temple I was a king
    When I spoke folks listened
    When I stood they kneeled
    You stood by my side and we lived a long time
    You were my queen and my guide
    Into the afterlife

    You ask me does this ring any bells?
    Tell me to ask a crystal if it recalls
    Me being a king and all
    I have to laugh
    Still I ask

    You say we were in a temple, I was your king
    But I was just a kid from Temple City
    Raised on TV and video games
    Before that I can't recall a thing

    I can't say that it rings any bells
    But I love to hear the stories you tell
    I know just as little of before life
    As I could ever know of after life
    But speaking on the in between
    I'm grateful you're my queen
    Hey when I call you my queen does it ring any bells?

  • Can’t Abide

    Work Work Work Work Work

    I started working at 13. A few days a week after school I bused tables, delivered drinks and food, took drink orders, cleaned and vacuumed at the end of the night, and handled cash at my uncle’s restaurant inside the El Monte Airport in the San Gabriel Valley – now renamed the San Gabriel Valley Airport. The minimum wage at the time was $6.75 an hour. For a 13 year old that felt like real money – enough to buy almost anything I wanted, which at that age was mostly CDs and music gear.

    What I remember most from that time was the feeling of being in the real world. School felt like a false reality, full of tedious drama and conflict from students and teachers alike. Work was different. People treated me with common respect. They spoke to me like a person. I was building actual skills, meeting actual people, having actual experiences.

    I worked in restaurants and a cafe through high school and into my twentieth year, from my uncle’s place to a local cafe where I learned to make coffee and espresso, and eventually Rod’s Grill, a 50s diner in Arcadia that operated for 70 years before closing in 2024. I worked there from the age of 17 to 20.

    During that time I was getting out into the real world more and more. I started studying music at Citrus College at 17 and outside of work and school I was playing a lot of music, often gigging on the weekends and going on adventures further and further away. I talked about some of these times in my entry for Our Golden Days Have Passed – and I will write in more detail about these times in future entries. I was taking less hours at the restaurant and eventually stepped away altogether to focus on traveling, just a few months before I left for Europe on a one-way ticket.

    From that point on I never took on a regular job again. Over the next year and a half on the road I sustained myself through minimalist living – couchsurfing, hitchhiking, sleeping outside, “dumpster diving” – and work exchange wherever I could find it. The summer of 2013 I worked across Ireland on a farm and homestead and in a couple of hostels and guest houses. In one summer I worked with horses and sheep, cleaned rooms and bathrooms, made beds, pulled weeds, painted sheds, helped prep and serve dinners and more. Hours of labor in exchange for a place to stay, food, and whatever else came with it. I continued seeking similar opportunities as I kept traveling across twenty-odd countries over the next few years. I did small money gigs here and there and even turned down opportunities for steadier paying work to keep moving.

    Those experiences changed something fundamental in how I think about work, time and money. Living simply, traveling on almost nothing, what I needed to be happy became pretty clear: food, shelter, people, nature, music. That’s about it. If I gave a few hours of my day to sustain a lifestyle I loved – even without making much (or any) money – that felt like a fair trade. I started to understand the difference between basic needs and higher needs. There are many things far more valuable than money.

    Traveling and returning to the US made this even clearer through contrast. The sense I got from many people I met across Europe was that their jobs were a means to an end rather than the end itself – people prioritizing close relationships with friends and family, meeting up daily as a matter of routine. My mom worked two jobs for most of my life and vacation wasn’t part of our vocabulary. Many Europeans receive nearly a month of paid vacation per year. In the US many can’t afford to take a day off even while sick. In the United States there seems to be more of a cultural expectation of devotion to the job.

    In the years before I settled in Oregon I earned occasional money teaching guitar lessons, performing and touring, doing temporary farm work, running live sound and production gigs. When I first arrived on the Oregon coast my first paying work was yard work, painting and planting for a local business – found on Craigslist. Soon after I started to find there was a real need for audiovisual skills in my area. I was unexpectedly offered work running tech for the county and simultaneously started getting more and more requests for photo, video and audio work.

    These were skills I had been developing for years with no intention of making a living from them. I took pictures and made videos, recorded and made music because I loved doing those things. And then I found I had a role to play in my community – skills that offered something beyond just making money. In recent years I’ve worked on community events, supported small businesses, venues, theaters, community groups and artists.

    I don’t work in the traditional sense. I’m a gig worker, an independent contractor, and I’ve had to establish a business entity for some of what I do. But ultimately not much has changed from the days of working farms and hostels across Europe – I’ve only continued with that same understanding of work and time. I put in countless hours into projects that don’t pay: my music, this archive, supporting friends and family, supporting community, looking after the dogs and cats, improving and building at home.

    I still travel often but the minimalist life on the road is behind me. I have real responsibilities, bills and debt to pay, and I need to earn some amount of money. But I don’t often seek work – through close connections with community, family and clients I keep my expenses low and find enough regular gigs to make ends meet and then some.

    Can’t Abide

    I recognize that for years – working odd jobs, living outside conventional employment, often broke or close to it – I could be perceived from the outside as someone who just needs to get a job. I resent the idea that the primary meaningful way to contribute to society is through holding down a job, that the J.O.B. has priority over all other forms of work and effort. I’m not lazy. On any given day I’m usually stretched thin juggling multiple projects and responsibilities, paid and unpaid, with no regularly scheduled activities and no real routine. It’s a chaotic way to live and at times I lose the balance and suffer consequences. But overall it works for me.

    In the hook I wrote: “I don’t think that a job brings us closer to God.” When I say God I’m not necessarily referring to the Judeo-Christian God. I’m talking about divinity, truth, deeper fulfillment – things I believe can be found in nature, in loving relationships, in acts of service and kindness, in our own motions towards self-actualization and genuine self-fulfillment. There are jobs that bring people closer to those things, but a job in itself is not divine. I think it’s important to distinguish between the job and the work. The work I take on needs to offer me something beyond money – I need to be building skills, contributing to something worthwhile, growing in some direction. The more time I spend on money gigs, the less time I have for the things that feel more essential.

    Can’t Abide was written during Tim Bulster’s song-a-week challenge in February 2024. I picked up the guitar to work on something else, started playing the main melody, opened a new project and had most of it within a couple of hours. I wrote a placeholder for a verse, told myself I’d come back to it, then listened the next day and realized I’d already said everything I wanted to say. That clarity – knowing when a song is finished – was something I was actively working on at the time. Around then I wrote in an email to the songwriting group: if you write what’s true to you, you can’t write badly. I still believe that.

    There’s a deeper root to all of this. Two family stories that came to me through my dad, both absorbed as a teenager. Both of them died when I was still a child – I wouldn’t hear these stories until years later.

    My dad visited my uncle on his deathbed and nervously tried to make conversation. My uncle wasn’t interested in small talk. All he could tell my dad was that he had wasted his life – he spent it chasing material things – and that it meant nothing. I didn’t feel my dad was trying to teach me a lesson when he told me this. He was expressing something that had hurt him deeply, almost from a place of trauma. But I took it as a lesson directly from my uncle to me. Like he had lived an entire life to arrive at something so that I wouldn’t have to suffer the same course and outcome.

    The second story was about my grandfather – my dad’s father, who came from Cuba, lived through the revolution, spent years working for nothing in labor camps before escaping to the United States. He worked hard his whole life and at some point was doing quite well. But through a series of misfortune and the weight of his habits and addictions he died sick and nearly broke. My dad told me that at the end he would ask to borrow small amounts of money to bet on horses at the racetrack. It hurt my dad so much to see his father die that way. I took it as a warning and another lesson – that a life built around the pursuit of material wealth is a dead end.

    Looking at what I have today – the skills, the community, the family and friends, the creative work, the home, the life I’ve built on the Oregon coast – it’s in many ways more than either of them had at the end. I haven’t been so focused on chasing money or chasing things. Everything I have came through community, family, friendship, art and travel – through the things that brought meaning to my life.

    I believe I am destined to lose everything, sooner or later. Even if I manage to keep it all to the end of my life, I will still have to let go and say goodbye. I suspect that what matters more in the end is how our efforts in life move through the world – through the people we’ve known and loved, through the art and stories we leave behind, through the work that will outlast us.

    “Can’t Abide”

    ^ Original Demo ^

    ^Live from home version^ (video below)

    I don’t want to trade my time
    Just to make a dime
    Off a dollar made for someone else

    They say I don’t want to work
    Like I’m just a lazy jerk
    Who only wants to take and give nothing to the world

    Well I don’t think that a job
    Brings us closer to God
    And all the money we make
    Means nothing in the end

    If I’m gonna take what’s mine
    Then I will take my time
    I’ve got dreams to fulfill in this life

    I’ll work for what matters to me
    I’ll work for my community
    I want to leave the world a bit better than I found it

    I know deep down
    I can’t abide the nine to five
    If I’m to live my life
    If I die broke I’ll walk that road
    I’ll go chasing the light

    I don’t think that a job
    Brings us closer to God
    And all the money we make
    Means nothing in the end

  • Timeless Expanse

    I often remember a series of dreams after waking. After a long night of dreaming especially, but also during shorter bursts. The dreams I was having during the days around Stephen’s services were getting extremely vivid – emotionally and spiritually charged in a way I don’t often experience. I believe those qualities are always present while dreaming on some level, but everything intensified during that time.

    I’ve been thinking about what may have led to this specifically. Grief is too broad a word for it. I think the fundamental thing that happened in that time was that I gave myself a pause – to sit with my feelings, to feel them, to be with friends, and more deeply to be with love. Losing Stephen cracked me open. It opened me to loving my friends more consciously, to trying to love him – which then means loving something without an obvious physical form. And perhaps loving something greater than any one person. Something eternal. Or something simpler. Right now eternity feels quite simple to me. I was feeling the timeless quality of the present moment – not something vast and distant, but something immediate and close.

    The night after the viewing I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life.

    In the dream, from the point I could remember, I was at a house party. It felt like LA. I felt a bit anxious and out of place, so I was quietly making my way out when I bumped into a guy while passing through a doorway. I apologized immediately and politely, but he was angry and had violence in his eyes. He would hear nothing of what I spoke. He and his friends pursued me as I tried to make my way out.

    I could feel many eyes upon me. I was clearly an outsider in this place. I could sense how badly they all intended to stop me – these men intended to hurt me. With growing intensity I tried to escape, outside and inside, and they followed. Then when I was cornered, a stranger showed me the way out, showed me the way to safety.

    I found myself in another house with a couple of old friends. I felt much safer, but not at ease. I could sense these men were still looking for me. Still in pursuit.

    With some intention I walked through a doorway – and suddenly I was standing inside what looked like an observation deck. A round structure built of what looked like bronze or brass, possibly copper. Roughly 30 feet across, with large windows all around.

    I was scared at first. I felt trapped. And then I realized – there is no time here. I had never been without the burden of past and future. But this was a place outside of time. And with that realization I no longer sensed that burden. No past, no present, no future. It felt eternal.

    I was no longer scared. I felt a deep contentment as I looked around and saw an environment unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined. In every direction – a vast expanse of what looked like mountains made of clouds, or clouds made of mountains. I didn’t recognize what I was seeing as purely solid, liquid, or gas. Whatever it was, it was also colorful – like sunsets, like all the colors of sky mixed together, all around me in every direction.

    I didn’t want to leave this place. I didn’t want to wake up. So I thought – I must take this in. Make the most of this.

    Some grand question came to mind. Without speaking, I asked this question directly to the timeless expanse.

    The response was immediate. A rumbling like thunder’s roar burst and tore through the atmosphere. It was like no sound I have ever heard, yet I could understand it in words right away.

    I remember everything about that experience – the fear and the contentment, the colorful clouds of mountains, the rumbling, the sense that I was not in one place, that there was no gravity, that I couldn’t tell whether there was glass in the windows or only open air. I remember being overwhelmed. I remember being humbled.

    I don’t remember what I asked. And I don’t remember the words that sounded in my head when the answer came.

    I seemed to wake up.

    Outside now. Bird songs and wind in the grass. Deeper gusts and the tree chimes. The grass dances before me. I sway with it, moving with it, dancing in the wind.

    Deeper still – in the distance – the sounds of people, my brothers and sisters in this world, ripping and roaring and cruising along their way.

    Funny sounds of chickens and frogs
    And dog barks here and there all around me
    Closer to my heart — Loki rustles in the grass
    Om is chewing rubber
    Streams of wind, like strings, crescendo from every direction

    An interruption. A motorcycle ripping down the road. Taken out of it.

    I held on to the moment for some time. I was talking about dreams, but the music of the moment overwhelmed me. So I wrote it down. I spoke it.

    I took something inside me – a feeling, an image in motion, a thought, an intangible idea – and I wrote it down, and I spoke it, and with that gave it a tangible place in this world.

  • Our Golden Days Have Passed

    This is the last song I wrote for the winter/spring round of the 2026 songwriting group. It was written during an extremely emotional time. I was mourning the sudden death of a dear friend – Stephen Reed – and I had returned to the LA area, the place where I spent the first 20 years of my life and a few more on and off after that.

    I took two trips down and spent nearly a month there consecutively – more time than I’d spent down there in seven or eight years, including flying home for a weekend in between. I was returning to people and places I hadn’t returned to in far too long. I knew that I had to. In this time, I had to reconnect.

    The relationships and conversations that came out of that month were long overdue. Some of my oldest and dearest friends – people I’ve known for half my life, people we were brought together by music. We played in bands together, played countless gigs together. There was a period for me from about 18 to 21 where my life revolved mostly around this community. We were studying music, working whatever jobs we had, but most of our free time revolved around each other. We played cover gigs, corporate events, fundraisers, weddings, country clubs, bars and restaurants. Beyond all that, we all had original projects going, playing bars, clubs, house parties, pizza spots and more. When we weren’t playing we were together – piling into cars to go on all sorts of adventures day and night.

    We were young, idealistic, naive, lucky. Life felt simpler then. I’m not sure we knew quite who or what we were. I know I didn’t. But somehow none of us have changed all that much. We’ve aged into our 30s and 40s now – still young, but no longer living wildly and freely and recklessly. The gigs and hangouts no longer feel endless and playful in the same way.

    I drove by Rad Stop – the first building a group of my friends began renting, which turned into many things over the years. First a rehearsal studio, then a bike shop, eventually a warehouse with many rooms used as artist studios and residences. It was one of my main home bases when I was visiting and spending time down there between 2014-2016. I stayed in several different rooms throughout the years. It was eventually condemned and demolished. Rad Pro, the successor to that space and the place where many of my early recordings were made – where I lived, kept space, and ran live sound for bands – has since moved and the original location is all boarded up. But Rad Stop is simply gone. When I drove by it was the first time I’d been in that area in eight or nine years. Where it once stood there is now an empty lot surrounded by a fence. In between the cement cracks there are weeds reaching up to the sky.

    I had a conversation with my old friend Ivan that I keep coming back to. He told me he’d been quite sad thinking about the people we came up with. He wanted to put on a concert in his parents’ backyard like he used to, invite bands from back in the day – but he quickly realized that three of the bands he thought of have all had members who passed away at tragically young ages. Stephen is just the latest in that string of three. Ivan said that they used to feel like we had so much promise, so much potential, all of us reaching for our dreams. But we’ve lived long enough to see the end of some of those dreams, the end of some of those stories. To him it appeared that those were golden days, when we were becoming. But those days are gone and now we are what has been.

    I replied: that’s bleak, bro.

    I told him I don’t feel that way. For me the growth has not stopped. I’m still learning, still crossing boundaries and finding myself on the other side of good things. I still believe in our potential – individually and collectively. We are still here and our stories are not done yet. And even in the case of Stephen, the actions of his lifetime are still ringing out in ways that are truly powerful and surprising. His work and influence on earth is not done. His story is not done.

    But still I was definitely feeling Ivan’s sentiments. It seemed like many people I visited with were struggling – with their work, their living situations, their relationships and the grief of losing our friend.

    Friends told me they wished I hadn’t left. They asked if I was coming back to stay. I told them no. Leaving one gathering, a friend asked if I was heading back to Oregon. I said yes. He asked when he would see me again. I said I don’t know.

    I’m writing this at home. I just stepped out the front door and into the forest. I feel no worry for tomorrow, little stress from the day. I’ve managed to find myself in a place I genuinely love, living a relatively simple, but fulfilling, interesting and peaceful life in a small town by the sea.

    But I carry complicated emotions around it. Deep gratitude for this life sits right alongside shame and guilt when I return to that place and those friends. In order to find this life for myself, I had to the old life behind.

    This song became a meditation on these feelings, these thoughts. Giving into some of the bleak and fatalistic feelings of the time and all that comes with the idea that our golden days may have passed.

    “Our Golden Days Have Passed”

    I left pieces of my heart in chunks down below
    Hit the road to save my soul
    To build new life I let the old one go
    I didn’t mean to abandon you
    I didn’t mean to abandon you

    Is it too late to say I love you too
    Is it too late to show my face in this place
    Where we once built a home now it’s an empty lot
    Gone without a trace fenced up and blocked off
    Now there’s just a few weeds reaching up J
    ust a few weeds reaching for us

    Our tribe was broken up spread out and beaten down
    And I feel like an alien when I come around
    Until we’re face-to-face and we start digging in
    We’re all struggling

    What started with a dream ended in death
    The best of us is gone we are what’s left
    Becoming has past now we are what has been
    Stuck in the present
    Our golden days have passed
    Our golden days have passed

  • My Opinions

    My Opinions began with lyrics written around February 2022. I don’t remember a specific incident that inspired them – the inspiration just seemed to be all around me. The earliest recording was an acapella voice memo I made while driving in the rain, awkwardly hunting for a melody with the lyrics in my mind. By mid-March the melodies were mostly worked out but I’d only written about half the song. It wasn’t until late 2023 during a song-a-week challenge that I finally finished it.

    Revisiting it now while writing this entry I went back and listened to those early demos. The earliest full version had this bouncy, upbeat fingerpicking feel – faster, more driving, more attitude. At some point I settled into something more laid-back and lost that edge. Listening back I think I prefer the earlier version. I might go back to it.

    This is a satirical song. The narrator is someone whose personal identity is so intertwined with their opinions that they can’t separate the two – and yet they have no real awareness of where those opinions came from in the first place.

    I used to think I was writing songs like this to point a finger at what I saw wrong in the world around me. But I think it’s more honest to say that these songs are cautionary notes to myself. I’ll take on a character, point outward, but really I’m processing something I recognize in myself. A frustration, a dissatisfaction, a tendency I want to keep in check.

    In this case I am writing about somebody whose opinions have gotten away from them – yet I am beaming with opinions about having opinions while I do it.

    An opinion isn’t a preference and it isn’t a fact. It’s a subjective hypothesis about a matter, based on the best information I have – with ignorance, limitations and blind spots built in. We are limited creatures. Limited by our senses, by the information available to us, by our ability to understand that information, by time and space. There is only so much you can learn in one lifetime. I believe there is vastly more that we will never know than anything we could possibly learn.

    How could I possibly take my opinions so seriously? What troubles me isn’t that we have opinions. It’s when the opinions become our identities. When disagreeing with someone’s view feels like an attack on who they are. At that point the opinion can no longer be examined – it has to be defended.

    My opinion is not my identity. I don’t put much stock in the idea of a fixed personal identity in the first place – but that’s a whole other opinion to dissect.

    I believe that many of our strongly held opinions weren’t arrived at through any deep process of critical thought. They were inherited, learned, absorbed. We heard something, it fit with what we already believed, we adopted it, forgot we adopted it, and now it’s ours. People will fight over a difference in opinion. They will hurt people. They will hurt themselves. People have killed over a different opinion. And a lot of those opinions, if you trace them back far enough, came from somewhere they can’t even identify.

    I’m not exempt. My opinions are suspect too – all of them, including everything I just said.

    My Opinions

    Where do we go when we die
    And more importantly
    When we die
    Where do our opinions go
    I hope that they live on and on
    In the hearts of those whom we had the chance
    To get up on our soapbox
    And mouth off to

    Please tell me
    Tell me that it’s okay
    To stay here holding on to
    These words in mind for all time
    I call my opinions

    In my home the news plays day and night
    And it shows me just exactly what the world is like
    The newsmen speak so plain and truthfully
    So you know it don’t surprise me
    That when they talk they always seem to speak
    My opinions
    My opinions

    Where oh where do we come from
    And more importantly
    Where do these opinions that I call my own come from
    I don’t know I may never know
    But what I do know Is that I seem to think much better than
    A lot of other people

    Please don’t tell me
    You’ve got it figured out
    When words fall out your mouth
    Are silly words
    That differ from my own
    My opinions
    My opinions

  • Werns

    Werns

    I wrote the first verse of this song in January 2024. Just as the song suggests, I was chilling at the beach watching my dogs dig. I can picture it vividly – sitting on Battle Rock Beach on a beautiful January afternoon, the dogs were digging and just making me laugh. I was filled with joy as I am in the simple moments with them. I think I wrote down the first few lines just as they are, and within a few days I started singing and playing this funky guitar melody to those words. The original demo was me just working out the melody with no more than four lines. Originally I had an extended melody for the intro and ended up keeping a compressed version of it for the demo I recorded. From there I didn’t develop the idea at all until January 2026, despite the song making it to several lists of “need to finish” song ideas and several rounds of song-a-week groups.

    This was a classic example of an idea that began without a premise – just a moment in time. As simple as the moment was and as simply as I wrote it down, I didn’t have a vision for the song beyond just describing that experience. I’ve lived half of my legal adult life with my dogs. They are such a major part of my life, as close to me as any human. Returning to develop this idea, I decided to dig into one of the most astonishing facts about the relationship between humans and canines: the sheer timescale.

    Far from Chihuahuas, we relied on them for protection and warmth, for aid in hunting and tracking, for safety. I believe there is something quintessentially human about this relationship – our ancestors chose each other and evolved together. Dogs have been on every continent, they’ve been in space, they’ve been present in every civilization. And now here we are. We call them man’s best friend, our closest and longest standing evolved companions. I feel this when I’m with my dogs. I feel it when I’m not thinking about it, and when I do think about it sometimes I feel a rush of love and honor. I feel so human and so connected to our history, our ancestors. I cherish my dogs. We carry them to the day they pass and carry them with us until our time comes. As we wander the beaches and forests of Oregon, and beyond – they live the majority of their days in the wild and spend little time behind fences, collar and leash. Often on our excursions we don’t see another human. Like our ancestors wandering together side by side.

    This song became a tribute not just to my dogs who I adore, but a statement on the humility I feel in their presence – acknowledging our ancient past together.

    P.S. The title is just one of dozens of silly names I’ve arrived at to call my dogs.

    “Werns”
    Chilling at the beach
    Watching my dogs digging
    A face shaped hole then they dive right in
    They got me laughing

    They give me a goofy sandy look
    Their tails wag in the breeze
    The bond we share is an ancient one
    We’ve been together so long

    Before we named our Gods
    We had dogs
    Before we wrote, before we spoke
    Any language known today

    They kept us safe out on the hunt
    They kept us warm in the cave
    We shared our food and buried their dead
    They’ve been family for so long

    Before we planted seeds
    Before we built cities
    From the cave to outer space
    We’ve come a long way together

    Chilling at the beach
    Watching my dogs digging
    The bond we share is an ancient one
    Tens of thousands of years long

  • Only The Lucky Grow Old

    Only The Lucky Grow Old

    This song was written during the first week of the fall 2025 songwriting group. I was already making progress on another song when this one came to me very quickly one night. I remember having a long day and getting very sick from some sort of caffeinated beverage in the evening. I was running sound at our local venue and sitting at the bar after the show when I had a conversation with an older man – he was at least twice my age. He said jokingly at some point, “I hope I stay young forever.”

    In that moment I felt three things at once: the awareness of my own youth sitting there next to him – I was just 33 years old. Then the awareness of friends who didn’t live much longer than I have, or barely made it past 33. Then the awareness that he was once my age and lived many more years that for me are probable at best, not guaranteed. I felt almost envious in that moment, realizing that I may have the gift of youth in his eyes, but he had the gift of time – time that some friends did not have, and I may not have. With all of this in mind, I replied, “Only the lucky grow old.” As soon as the phrase came to my mind and I spoke those words, I had this feeling: “That’s a good line!”

    After we wrapped up that conversation, I made my way home and the closer I got to the house, the more the caffeine-induced headache intensified. During that short drive, the melody and lines just started coming to me one after the other, and I sang them into my phone as I climbed up the hill. As soon as I got into the house and fed the dogs and cats, I retreated to my room where I shut the door and shut off all the lights. With this headache pounding, I sat down and worked out the entire song in the dark, line by line, working towards the line that inspired the whole thing.

    I was writing about all the things that were weighing heavy on my mind at that time: struggling financially, in serious debt, drowning under the weight of many responsibilities, while also looking at losing essential benefits, and all the while reflecting on the young friends who have lost everything and my own feelings of guilt and regret. The song ended up taking an ironic position – we are the lucky ones who are still here, still breathing, still going, growing older – yet we’re here spending our precious luck stressing about survival.

    After finishing the last lines, I laid down and slept for 10 hours.


    One more letter
    Written halfway
    Crumbled up
    Thrown away
    Just a taste to tease the heart ache

    If there’s a cure
    I ain’t gonna find it
    I never called back
    My therapist
    When they canceled twice
    I tossed their card away

    Come new years I won’t be insured
    Word came down from the billionaires
    They won’t keep floating a broke down bum like me
    When I shoulda been working I was on the road
    I came home when I had nowhere else to go
    I’ve gone broke again seeing how far I could bend

    That little squiggle scratched on the line
    On paper with the land and the man
    My name is not my name but if I don’t pay
    They could take it all away
    Take it all away

    I miss the simple days
    I miss sleeping on the side of the road
    I miss having no home no car no guitars no phone

    If I could go back
    I’d gather up the letters I tossed
    Package them and send em to the friends I’ve lost
    I had one chance and I’ve never been bold
    Only the lucky grow old

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    One last thing I would like to share about this song is a recording from my good friend Liam Warden, who sent me a piano and vocal rendition just days after I first recorded it and sent it to him. I prefer his version to my own, and it made me appreciate the song so much more.

  • Perfect Time

    I arrived in Hobart in perfect time on March 20th. I was picked up at the airport by my new friend Dave, the kiwi I had met on Oahu. He took me to his home in Geilston Bay, the address of which is on my Tasmanian ID (valid till 2029). I arrived in the late evening so he got me set up in the guest space and showed me out to a space in the backyard where he kept his music gear. There he left me with the invite to play his drums, basses and acoustic guitar.

    I grabbed the guitar and the very first thing I started playing was this song. Perfect Time started with the intro – the melody and words came all at once:

    You can’t miss when you don’t aim
    Sit still and take it all in

    Guts tame our wounded hearts
    Press our heads to the grumbles

    Just like that I was off with the chord change, and the song dropping into the main section. The lines continued to come to me:

    There’s a song in the distance
    I can’t call the tune
    But I’ll sing what I hear and you can harmonize

    And it continued:

    We may never catch up to the tune
    We may be gone too soon
    But we care not for the future
    Here in perfect time

    All of this came all at once as soon as I touched the guitar. This would become the theme for my arrival on the island in the days to come.

    Around that time, I had been considering that acceptance is essential if I ever wish to be in accordance with reality. Anything and everything that occurs in our universe, for better and for worse, is “meant to be.” All the triumph and tragedy that brings about hope and joy, suffering and despair, is the only law and order in an otherwise chaotic existence.

    I spend plenty of time thinking about the past. Sometimes I’ll allow my mind to trail off to thoughts of what could’ve been – what I could’ve said, what I could’ve done differently, if I’d just kept walking down that road or turned my back on something before it was too late. These thoughts are not helpful, generally speaking. But I was coming back to this idea that I must accept that everything happens in perfect time. Although I could imagine things that could’ve been done to change the course of reality, the fact that something occurred simply means that was the only way it could’ve been. To deny that, to fight it, to try and think my way out of it or around it, would be to break from reality.

    It’s easy to say in moments of hope and optimism that everything happens in perfect time. It’s harder to say when tragedy strikes, when a dear friend is lost too soon, in moments where it sinks in that every living thing must die, recognizing that someday I will have to say farewell to all things.

    I spend so much time trying to make sense of the past, anticipating and predicting the future, yet the only thing that really matters, the only thing that exists, is right now. Right now is not a problem to be solved, only an experience to be had. In the clearest moments, we can settle into that presence, and all fear and anxiety and worry and dread will wash away.

    I had the first chunk of the song for some time, and I played around with it throughout the time I spent on my first trip to Tasmania. But I didn’t end up finishing the song until later in the year when I was back home during one of the song-a-week challenges.

    One cliché says it all: life is full of surprises.
    Don’t know how much time we got
    How many sunrises
    We may never see another moon
    We may be gone too soon
    But we care not for the future
    Here in perfect time

    The song is really quite simple in its scope. My mind goes off into mortality. There’s a layer of melancholy and melancholic contemplation lining the core of my being, rarely without presence in my thoughts. But this song is meant to be a declaration of acceptance – acceptance of our own mortality, an acceptance and letting go of all worry for a future that is not guaranteed, that does not exist, and on some fundamental level, a future that does not concern us.

    I have seen people express this idea that 1,000 years may pass, 10,000 or 100,000 years may pass, eventually everyone we knew, everything we knew, every trace and memory of us may be gone – and therefore, what is the point? But the events of this universe 100,000 years from now are even more meaningless than we could ever be, because we exist. We are here now, and in that, life has great meaning.

    The future is not guaranteed. We understand that the universe will go on, but the future for us, for humanity, for our ancestors, is not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is this present moment, so long as we are here. We exist, and here we shall remain – in perfect time.

  • Website – Visions

    Hello, reader of these words. I am rebuilding this website with a specific concept in mind – creating a place where I can share my work directly and catalog my work, life and recordings.

    I doubt the practicality and relevance of a “www.com” website here in 2025, but my sense of fatigue and conflict around platforms like ig/faboo/spotify have grown too discomforting to ignore. I want to share my work in a medium that doesn’t feel ethically questionable, even if I am limiting the potential ‘reach’ of the work. I will continue to use said platforms to share minimally, but I will point people to the website for the majority of what I do.

    My motivation to create has little to do with reach in the first place and I have simple ambitions when it comes to my music, mainly that I wish to continue the process of creating music. I don’t feel the need to make instagram reels in order to create music. Whether I share online or with just a select few people as I normally do, I am constantly writing, recording, making videos, practicing and playing.

    As the fleeting sense of desire to share strikes me, I will make posts here. Overtime I’d like to build a catalog of posts featuring songs, stories, pictures, videos, memories. Thank you for reading these words.

    epd