Tag: life

Introduction

Before I get to the songs, some context around this batch. A year had elapsed since the first songwriting challenge, which I’d begun just before embarking on a major, life-changing quest to find a new home. That quest will surely be the subject of future entries, but in the months following the 2017 song-a-day challenge I essentially closed one chapter of my life and began another that carries to the present day — a new life, a new home, a shift from a lifestyle of constant extended travels and fleeting returns to a life among friends and family. I arrived on the Oregon coast in August 2017, so by the time July rolled around again I was in my first full summer in Oregon.

At that point the house was functioning more as a halfway home than the solitary space or family home it would become later on. There were quite a few friends and roommates coming and going over those months. (In the challenges the following year, most everyone had moved out and I began living alone for long periods, which led to very different processes of recording and writing.) I believe the majority of these songs were written and recorded in an upstairs bedroom — the smallest room in the house, which I’d turned into a simple dedicated recording space with just a laptop and interface, a couple of mics, and a Casio keyboard that can be heard on a number of the songs. (That same keyboard can be heard back in the 2017 challenge on Chasing Cars, which was recorded almost entirely on it.)

For me, writing and recording tends to be a solitary practice. I don’t remember being bothered by my housemates, but their presence surely influenced the process, and there was some collaboration happening that I’ll get to in the individual songs. This batch also followed a period of travel that was significant for me — I spent the spring of 2018 traveling in Europe, between mainland Spain, the Canary Islands, back to Spain, then into France and Germany. Some of the inspiration and writing from that trip made it into these songs.

I was also doing a lot of experimenting with recording and writing during this challenge. Instead of my more typical approach — sitting with an acoustic guitar, writing chords, lyrics and melodies, then recording them — I was starting many of these projects by experimenting with sounds in the DAW (still GarageBand at this point), building songs up as collages from loops, programmed drums, and keyboard parts. Several of these have no guitar or bass on them at all.

In writing this entry I’ll be returning to a number of these songs, listening to them for the first time in ages. A handful found new life in live performance — solo and with The Planet Of — but plenty never went beyond the challenge. I’ll be revisiting the ideas, tracing what I can remember about the process and inspiration, and sharing how I feel about them today. One special note about this batch: I was able to find the original Facebook group we used for this round, so I’ll be digging through it for any context I might have lost to time.

Somehow — even before digging back into the recordings — this period feels less vivid and visceral in my memory than the July 2017 tracks. I’m not sure why. I’ll return to that question by the end and see if anything has been illuminated. Here I go.

1. An Uplifting Indie Pop Song

This is one of the most genuinely positive and earnest songs I’ve ever written. It’s uncharacteristically sincere — and as the title suggests, I couldn’t take that sincerity all the way to the finish line. Sometimes a working title gets attached to an idea and just sticks; at this point I don’t know what else I’d call it, and regardless, the title describes exactly what the song is.

I remember finding the riff first — the song was built around the melodic acoustic guitar you hear in the intro, which immediately evoked the mood of the verses. It was written in response to a conversation I’d had with a friend just before the challenge began. I can’t remember the details, only that she was struggling — feeling depressed and discouraged in life. My first thought with the brightness of the riff was just what I’d want to tell her, some words of encouragement: simply, don’t you worry about one damn thing, you’ll be okay. I’m prone to anxiety and depression myself, and phrases like that don’t always make for the best help or land as effective — but I was writing from a genuine place, with her in mind.

The song came with a particular stylistic flavor from the start, so I kept pulling that thread and leaned into it, resisting any inclination toward silliness, absurdity or darkness. It came out sounding like the kind of indie pop I might’ve been listening to in the late 2000s or early 2010s. I even programmed some claps in there — this might be my only song with claps. I never performed it and never really revisited it beyond the occasional listen over the years. I have a small batch of songs that sit in this register, and I’ve considered putting them together and re-recording them as a project. Maybe someday. For now I’m just happy to listen, and happy that the challenge gave me the incentive to tap into this and make something simply positive. It’s honestly something I rarely reach for when I write.

Don't 
You worry 
About 
One 
Damn thing
We'll be okay 
We'll be okay 

We did not choose to be conflicted
Stuck in the muk of anxieties 
We are meant for something greater than these 
Insecurities 

We are worthy
Of all good things
That come our way 
That come our way...

2. His Royal Mop

Ah, His Royal Mop. This one was a live staple and fan favorite with The Planet Of. Just before the song-a-day challenge began in mid-July, my dear friend Liam Warden reached out and proposed a one-on-one song challenge — we’d each suggest a topic to the other, with two weeks to write a song about it. The very first topic he gave me was simply “Trump’s wig.” I loved it, and I accepted.

I wrote the bulk of this in one sitting. Once I started playing the intro riff it just came out, line by line and riff by riff. The original version was quite short, but eventually we arranged an extended version for live performances. For the lyrics I really just tried to stay true to the prompt — I wasn’t attempting any kind of political statement or deep social commentary. I started from the old controversy over whether Trump has real hair or wears a wig. Compared to today’s controversies, that seems almost quaint — simpler times, in hindsight. Writing about a presidential wig gave me the chance for some ridiculously silly lines: “blowing in her (America’s) wind, anchored by cosmetic pins,” and “surely you’da seen it, I wonder who’s gotta clean it.” Some real poetry at work here.

The final piece plays as a genuine rock anthem. It was so fun to play live, though to be honest, in some rooms I was a bit nervous about how it would go over, and I definitely got some strange looks along the way. But like I said, it became a fan favorite — a song folks would request over the years. This is a more recent demo recorded with The Planet Of:

There’s a new piece in Washington D.C.
Everybody’s seen it boy that piece is making waves
Making waves and sparking controversy in the streets
Some just won’t believe it
Others don’t wanna see it

But god damn it’s taken our darling nation by storm
Scoured across the flag
It’s got America in a bag
Blowing in her wind
Anchored by cosmetic pins

Trumps wig
Trumps wig
Trumps wi-i-i-i-ig

The worlds most famous mop
‘Less you been under a rock
Hiding from bad politics and “bad-er” hair

Surely youda seen it
Wonder who’s gotta clean it
That thin fluff of stuff on top of that goon that everybody knows
The latest piece in the White House

Trumps wig
Trumps wig
Trumps wi-i-i-i-ig

God bless America and Trump’s wig

3. Little Dreams

This was written as a short song — but instead of being inspired by a particular dream, it’s about the dreams I don’t remember. One moment I could be in the middle of a dream, having a very visceral, emotional, sensory experience, and the next I’m awake with no recollection. I still had the experience, I lived it, but by the time I woke it’s like the dream just slipped away. I’m left with a kind of remembrance — I can feel that I was somewhere, that I met somebody, had some conversation, that there was an image or sound that was with me, yet it’s gone. That’s what I was trying to capture. I fleshed it out a bit more into a developed version I never quite finished a few years back. I think I’ll revisit it, and if I do, I’ll include it below alongside the original demo.

Little dreams
Fall out of my ear
Soon as I awake 
They slip away 

Sometimes I wake up stressed
I remember something fuzzy 
But I forget the rest 
I always wake up buzzing 

Little dreams
Sailing away 
With a part of me

4. Easy Quick Song

At the time of this challenge I was just starting to settle into some routine in my new life on the Oregon coast. I wasn’t working a lot, but I had a couple of regular guitar students and some audiovisual work in the county. Not extremely busy, but more regular commitments than the previous year, when I could give myself almost entirely to the challenge. Some days I could focus on writing all day, but a lot of these songs were written or imagined more in passing, while driving between lessons or gigs.

This one was written one evening when I knew my time and energy would be short. I remember driving home and coming up with the idea that I just needed to write something simple and quick to keep up with the challenge. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time recording or finessing it, so I think I wrote the lyrics before I had any musical structure in mind. It was also an example of stylistically pushing in a different direction — where a lot of these songs were more electronic, this one I decided to lean into rock and guitar. I thought about doing a simple power-chord punk jam, but it ended up more elaborate, with guitar layers and a few distinct sections. It got a little more complicated than I’d set out for, and I was spending more time on the arrangement than I’d wanted, but in the end I was quite happy with it. I like short songs that still feel developed — a very quick journey. This one has a distinct intro and outro plus a sort of chorus, all in a couple of minutes. I remember the late, great Chris Swanson giving me props on this one in particular. He was a staple in the songwriting groups, always coming up with creative, well-done songs day after day, challenge after challenge — so props from him I was happy to take.

Easy quick song
Shouldn’t take long
I don’t got much time
Living on the grind

Everything’s a chore
In this busy world
Weeks are gone before I get to know them
Anyway I always seem to blow them

Easy quick song
Shouldn’t take long
 I don’t have the time
Living on the grind

5. 13th (Unlucky Day)

This one had a pretty loose concept, and I was taking an experimental approach with the arrangement — built around a repeating keyboard part. I guess I was thinking about the Friday the 13th that had just passed that June, before the challenge began. I’m not superstitious, but I started writing about this unlucky day, and soon connected it to a recurring theme in my dreams over the years: zombies.

Since I was a child I’ve had many zombie dreams, ranging from legitimately terrifying nightmares to amusing, thrilling, adventurous survival dreams. One notable one, from my early 20s, began in a hilly coastal town with old buildings and cobblestone streets. I looked around to see chaos — people fleeing, dozens of violent, brainless zombies running through the streets attacking anyone in reach, including me. Very quickly I was attacked, and the dream started over, back at the same cobblestone starting point. This time I made it a little further before I was overtaken again — and it restarted once more, except now I felt a stronger urgency to escape. I abandoned running and started flying, which is an important skill worth developing for any lucid dreamer — especially one who finds themselves pursued by brain-eating zombies on a semi-regular basis. I flew high above the town, could sense the chaos below, and made my way to a stretch of forest that sloped down to the ocean. I descended onto the beach and had a few peaceful moments — the town far behind me, my best escape yet. But after some time I could hear the zombies rushing through the forest, down the hill toward me. The dream ended with me looking out to the ocean with a sense of resignation and acceptance. I did my best. All I can do is try again. But before they reached me, I woke up.

The flying trick doesn’t always work. In another zombie dream years later, closer to the time of writing this song, my brother and I were hiding in a building with zombies outside. When I saw a chance to pick a couple of them off, I summoned some kind of weapon and shot at them — which completely blew our cover, and suddenly the building was being rushed by a legion of them. I immediately took to the sky and flew away, only to look back and realize I was still being pursued. My last thought before waking was: oh shoot, these aren’t zombies — they’re witches! Which made sense at the time. I woke up laughing.

I can’t remember if one specific dream inspired this song, more just a particular atmosphere I’ve experienced across dreams over the years. My dreams are often quite dark, the colors desaturated — I believe this actually helps with my lucid dreaming, helps me maintain the distinction between vivid waking life and the dream world. I was imagining a dark, quiet, gray city where I walk the streets alone, but I can feel I’m being followed — watched, stalked by slow-moving zombies that want to tap my brain. That’s an unlucky day. The concept is loose and the lyrics were pretty late, but I was just trying to achieve an atmosphere that evoked the scene and built to some jump in intensity.

Unlucky day
Unlucky day
Unlucky day
Unlucky 

A city full of zombies
Had a dozen following
Trying to tap my brain 
Silently stalking me

Unlucky day
Unlucky day 
Unlucky day 
Unlucky

6. Monster

This is a fantasy song, meant as a sort of declaration against the powers that be — specifically the powers that divide us, break us down and turn us against each other in ideological and class warfare. Back then I was still hanging onto some fantasy that the common people might unite and rebel against these forces, fight for our own independence, freedom, and basic human decency. In the song I referred to a monster, and began to imagine that force personified as an actual beast — supernatural in shape and power, poisoning our minds, killing us, but no longer tolerated. The song becomes a cathartic, violent fantasy: the way we tear out its eyes and tongue, the way we unite to put an end to it, keeping pieces of it as a trophy.

It’s quite different from anything I’d typically write, and honestly I can’t quite remember what possessed me to write it at that moment in the challenge — though one doesn’t have to look far to imagine how I might’ve been feeling. Time has moved forward, and I remain hopeful but not optimistic, so I stick with the fantasy that all common, decent people will unite to take a stand against this monster and reclaim our minds and lives.

This monster 
Is falling to his knees
He's angry and kicking up a shit storm  
He's poisoned our minds and taken our lives 
This monster
(Now) we will
Pull him 
Down 
His sweaty/crooked brow stinks 
The all seeing beast
We'll tear out his eye
We'll roll it down the street
We'll scream for all to meet 
We will not wear disguises 
We will pull him down 
Burst his belly open 
Bring life back to the living in the act
Reclaim the light from the shadows of our friends
Dislocate his jaw
He has not deceived us all
His twisted tongue will become a trophy 
We might be sick but we're ain’t soft and sorry suckers who won't stand up 
This monster 
Is falling to his knees
He's angry and kicking up a shit storm  
He's poisoned our minds and taken many lives but this the end
But we are
Pulling him 
Down 

7. Unplugged

The first version of this song was written and submitted for the 2017 challenge. I recorded a very rough demo and was never quite happy with it, so I brought it back and updated it during the 2018 challenge — the 2018 demo is the only version that survives. Musically it opens with an upbeat, slightly progressive guitar riff, then drops into a halftime hip-hop groove over a couple of beautiful chord changes. I’m sort of rapping the verses — not in style exactly, but in the cadence.

The song is an expression of something I’ve grappled with for many years. Ever since using Facebook and Instagram, I’ve felt conflicted and genuinely concerned about the effects these platforms have on our social lives, our sense of identity, our language, and our relationship to real physical reality. I’d been theorizing that through these platforms, many common words were losing meaning — their definitions splitting and splintering in our minds. Words that once referred to deep relational things — friend, connection, like, chat — repurposed to describe surface-level digital interactions. Dead words standing. I find this extremely unfortunate.

By the time I revisited the song in 2018, I had deleted my Instagram and Facebook, keeping only an account under a fake name to participate in the songwriting group. Eventually I gave in and used Facebook for Marketplace and local groups, which led to changing the account to my real name, and after a few years, returning to Instagram to promote my music and the podcast. From early 2024 into 2025 I was posting regularly, and truthfully I found it quite effective. But the discomfort kept taking precedence, and eventually I resolved to remove nearly everything I’d posted. I haven’t made a new post in nearly a year. A lot of this coincided with me beginning to build this website — and now that the site is taking shape and I feel more motivated to get the word out, it’s unfortunately still through these platforms that I have the most reach. I remain conflicted, and I haven’t found a way to use them that feels good.

This song is all about that conflict — my concern about the damage to our language and our sense of genuine connection. It becomes a declaration: I want to live. I want to experience life fully, outside of these hopeless mediums.

Who
and what
Are we
Supposed
To be
How did social life become symbolic and numerical
The fluid and spontaneous was dropped for the mechanical
Now everyone we know flows in a stream at our convenience
We look into the window and see images of each of em
They’re reaching to the glass for some kind of recognition
Their eyes move up and down scrolling every which direction and
It’s hard not to compare with all the popups everywhere
How can we progress if we don’t stress the way we press
If our page is incomplete and we don’t know what to share
Will we be forgotten will our story end there

Don’t – Plug – Me in
I – Want – To live
I want to taste the clean air on my lips
I want to feel fresh water on my hips
Don’t plug me in I want to stay alive
Yes I mean to say I want to go outside
(And stay outside)
I want to walk the pace of true experience
I want to be removed from hopeless mediums
Don’t want to touch the glass any longer
Don’t want to fuck the glass and feed the monster while it grows stronger
and changes the meaning of the words of yesteryear
Chat like and message (dead words standing)
Followers follow and request
Profile page react share friends groups and connection
All these words are losing definition
We traded our terms for theirs and broken our connections
Given up our energy lives and privacy to the cold and indifferent machine on the glass

Don’t – Plug – Me in
I – Want – To live
Don’t – Plug – Me in
I – Want – To live

8. Eight Plays (For the Ukraine)

SoundCloud has long fallen from its position as a top place to discover and share music, but I still use it — putting up my songs, making playlists, quickly referencing and listening to my own catalog online. I’ve never put any real care into promoting there; instead people would randomly find my music, and over the years I’d be surprised to see a song of mine on someone’s playlist or on repeat by a stranger somewhere far away.

I began writing this song after seeing I was getting plays in Ukraine, which I thought was interesting. This was years ago, before Ukraine was in the regular news for the conflict with Russia, and I had no real reference point for the place. I wasn’t getting many plays at all, so seeing someone in Ukraine find my music and listen over the course of a few days inspired me to write a song for them. I started with the repeating “eight plays in the Ukraine,” which became the ending vamp, and quickly thought it could be an interesting experiment and challenge to write the song in Ukrainian.

I started looking up resources online for Ukrainian phrases and pronunciations, and was surprised how few I could find — but I did find one page geared toward travelers and new students of the language. I selected some of my favorite phrases, did some translating of a couple of other lines on my own, and once I pieced them together I spent time on the pronunciations, writing them out phonetically and practicing. I still haven’t had a chance to get feedback from an actual Ukrainian speaker, and I don’t know if my mystery fan ever heard it. I built the melody one phrase at a time in this foreign language. I can’t vouch for the pronunciation or whether the intonation makes sense. What started as a simple thank-you and silly tribute to my Ukrainian listener ended up becoming a fully developed bilingual rock jam with a few distinct sections and melodies. If anyone does speak Ukrainian and gives it a listen — I’d love to hear your thoughts. How’d I do? Does it make any sense in context?

Eight plays in the Ukraine
This one's for youПриємно познайомитися
(Nice to meet you)
Ви дуже особливі
(You are very special)
вісім мій улюблений
(eight is my favorite)
Мені подобається українська мова
(I like the Ukrainian language)
Однієї мови ніколи не досить
(One language is never enough)
Принесіть чашку свіжими фруктами
(Bring a cup with fresh fruit)
Я вегетаріанець
(I am a vegetarian)
Ти вийдеш за мене заміж?
(Will you marry me?)
Я просто жартую
(I'm just joking)
Я не розмовляю добре українською
(I don't speak Ukrainian well)

Eight plays in the Ukraine
Eight plays in the Ukraine
Eight plays in the Ukraine
Eight plays in the Ukraine
Eight plays in the Ukraine
Eight plays in the Ukraine
Eight plays in the Ukraine
Eight plays in the Ukraine
This one's for Ukraine

9. We Thirsty

This is a song about a phenomenon I observed for years among my friends and myself — one that in a sense continues to this day. It comes with just being broke. Most of my friends and I don’t come from wealth or educated families with property and businesses, and despite all our skills and intelligence and experience, there’s a lot of working dead-end jobs, food service, gig work to get by. So a very common reality was being out and about, hanging out, and realizing we were too broke to do much.

I understand the struggle — it’s a luxury to eat out — but one piece always stood out to me. I remember plenty of times with friends, before or after a gig or rehearsal or just hanging out, when someone would suggest grabbing food and someone else would say they were too broke. And most of the time if we did eat, fast food was on the menu — Jack in the Box, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Del Taco, somewhere you could get something for five bucks or less. (This was some time ago; I haven’t eaten at those places in years.) But the thing that partially inspired the song was seeing people too broke to buy cheap food who somehow always had their vices on hand — alcohol, tobacco, marijuana. So the song is about that: living in a dust bowl where we can hardly breathe, have little hope or dreams, can hardly afford a meal, yet always manage to have a drink and a smoke ready. If I were to rewrite it today, I’d lean more into the fact that these vices serve as a kind of medicine to help the struggle go down. As written, it just ends by noting we might be addicted. Oh well.

Life in the dust bowl 
We can hardly breathe
Mirages stretched across the road 
We're thirsty 
We're craving something juicy 
Dancing in the mirage 
We’re never getting quenched
We're thirsty 
We're craving something juicy 
Dancing in the mirage 
Life in the everyday 
It's burning outside 
Two hundred degrees 
And we don't believe in good things 
We're thirsty 
We're chasing something juicy 
Dancing in the mirage 
We’re broke
It’s a joke
We can hardly cop a meal
But we’ve always got a drink and a smoke
Life in the every day
Our only to relief is 
Alcohol
Our only to relief is 
Alcohol
Our only release is
Alcohol
Everybody loves it
Alcohol 
We might be addicted
Alcohol 

10. Water > Gold

I was inspired to write this after listening to a NASA podcast about the present and future of space colonization — particularly the prospects of human colonies on the moon. One detail stood out: they talked about how scarce and valuable water would be in a space colony, noting specifically that water would be far more valuable than gold on the moon. That point alone inspired the title and the central line.

Musically it’s built around a couple of riffs, the main one reminding me of circus music or something like that. I had a few visuals in mind — an approach to the moon, homes and structures spread across a lunar hillside, personal robots being sent down into the icy depths of craters below the colonies, where the sun don’t shine, to collect and process usable water. I’ve always viewed this as an unfinished song — more of a sketch, something I wanted to get back to eventually and just haven’t yet.

Moon moon moon moon

Housed on sunny peaks 
We send our robots down 
Into total freezing darkness 
Off they go 
To harvest fuel 
Greater than gold 

Water water water water

Moon moon moon moon

11. UFO

This is a pretty interesting one. It’s sort of about aliens — which I absolutely do not believe in — a fantastical, sci-fi kind of song.

I’ll be honest: this one took several days to piece together. To survive the song-a-day challenges I’d simplified the rule for myself — instead of writing, recording and submitting one brand-new thing every day, I treated it as: start something new every day, and finish something new every day. In practice that meant I’d often have two or more new ideas going on any given day. Usually the song I started that day would be finished and submitted that day, but with UFO I’d started it within the first couple of days and kept pushing its submission because the recording grew more ambitious than I could finish in a day. I had the concept and a lot of the riffs, but I kept working it piece by piece, and when I recognized I wouldn’t have the focus to finish it as I wanted, I’d push through something else — like Easy Quick Song — instead. I must’ve worked at this one for at least five days before I finished the demo.

The first inspiration for the lyrics came from an experience around 2014 or 2015. I was hanging out with a group of friends and bandmates, out in a large grass field — I can’t remember if it was a public park or if we’d hopped a fence into a schoolyard. It was late afternoon; the sun had just about set in the west, and the sky was pink and red and yellow, painted with smog. We were moseying through the field talking when all of a sudden we looked up to see an object ripping through the sky. The sky wasn’t dark — I’d only ever seen shooting stars at night — and this was bigger, brighter, and lasted longer than any I’d ever seen. That image remains vividly in my memory.

So the first lines refer to that. I’m sure we joked immediately about aliens and UFOs, but I don’t believe in aliens. I recognize that’s not the most popular position these days, or maybe among the company I keep, but I’m a skeptic — and despite having witnessed some wild sights in the sky and heard some compelling personal testimonies, I don’t believe we’re being visited or secretly inhabited by creatures from another planet. Regardless, I thought I’d have some fun, so the song becomes a fantasy: it begins with a UFO sighting and gradually turns into an open letter to these visitors who revealed themselves to me that day. I write about feelings of alienation — no pun intended — and not belonging in this world. I think that’s a common feeling, but I’d say it has more to do with the human condition, with human psychology, with discrepancies in social identity and the pressures of cultural conformity. I don’t believe we could be more human anywhere but this earth, which is our one and only home, our paradise. So what begins as a confession and a call for rescue turns into an acknowledgment of the wonderful things this world has to offer. If visitors did come, I’d want to show them everything — this is such a geologically diverse, alive planet: active volcanoes, deserts, mountains, jungles, tundras, so much of it covered in water in all its forms, such an abundance of life that would fascinate any curious visitor. In the same way I love to host international friends in the US and show them all our grit and glory, I love this image of taking an extraterrestrial around the planet to admire everything earth has to offer. At the end I acknowledge that I love this earth and I’m not really sick of it — I just want to experience something different, something new — and then I’ll be ready and waiting to be picked up and taken away. There’s a line I like: maybe the clouds are just projections that paint the sky to obscure the heavens.

I remember the light that sliced the sky
Straight cross the middle in day time 
Like a scene from apocalyptic dreams that pass in the night I watched in awe and when you disappeared I knew 

That was no falling star 
I've watched stars fall before 
You showed yourselves to me 
Space family 

I know I am flesh and bone 
Of Earth born and grown 
But on this rock I feel alone 

Maybe the clouds are just projections 
That paint the sky to obscure the heavens
I've seen you once let me see you again 
Please take me away if you think I'm ready 
Won't you show me your home if someday you'll have me Take me away at your convenience 
I'll be here all day, everyday 
I'll be here all day, everyday 

I'm over this planet 
maybe you can't understand it 
as a tourist exploring everything is nice and new and has a sheen Of course there is a lot of good on our shiny planet it’s blue and green in many places but the disgrace is we're  destroying ourselves and eating away at all the good things 
Well I digress I guess for a visitor now is as good a time as any So pick me up and I'll take you around 
I’ll show you all my favorite things and places 
and if we make it to the zoo 
I’ll show you my favorite people too 
We can flyby snowy caps 
depending on your climate or swim in warm waters 
I'll take you to my Islands 
I’ll show you volcanoes, forests, deserts 
I’ll show craters Great Lakes valleys and rivers 
You’ll have to sample all the great tasty plants sweet tart and  bitter 
I don’t dislike this planet I love it 
It’s just that I’m interested in something different, something  truly new
If I show you mine will you show me yours 

Please take me away if you think I’m ready 
Show me your home if someday you'll meet me 
Take me away somewhere in outer space 
Take me away if you think I’m ready 
Show me your home if someday you'll meet me 
Take me away I’ll be here everyday 

I’ll play you a song 
I’ll show you some music 
I’ll show you some art 
Show you a movie 
Show you how we do it 
On planet earth 
Just pick me up 
I’ll be ready 
Just pick me up 
UFO UFO UFO UFO 

12. Hearing Loss

This is a very noisy and sonically offensive piece that came together as a sound collage — a collaboration with my brother Ryan Feliciano, who plays all the wildest guitar parts, and my friend and roommate at the time, Fernando Soto, whose voice you can hear on the track. Fernando was in the room while I was experimenting with generating and recording feedback, and I’m glad I caught him as the commentator — noting that it’s too long, too loud, that it hurts to hear. I took some riffs I’d recorded, asked Ryan to record an extended solo and get a lot of ideas out, and then cut up and pieced together the final track from a mix of Ryan’s guitar, my original riffs, Fernando’s voice, and the feedback. Listen if you dare, and beware of hearing loss. Always.

Ft Ryan Feliciano on guitar & the voice of Fernando Soto

13. Missed Connections

This song began over a month before the challenge started, in the final days of my spring trip to Europe, when I arrived in Germany. (As I mentioned in the overview, I’ve begun working on a larger entry covering this period of travel in greater detail.) Those last days, traveling from France to Germany to visit friends, were eventful and full of mishaps — one of which inspired this song.

I flew into Berlin one morning, scheduled to meet an old friend for breakfast. I’d booked a bus from Berlin to Göttingen, about a four-hour trip. After breakfast we parted ways, and I made my way to the bus station only to find it closed for renovations — buses were doing their pickups at another station across town. Suddenly my relaxing stroll turned into a frantic scramble to reach this surprise station as fast as possible. I ran to catch a train, then a transfer, then ran several blocks, only to arrive minutes after my bus had left.

Now, this is Germany, so there’d be other buses and trains — but this was also me in the final days of travel, having spent essentially all my money getting to Germany and booking this ticket plus the return trip to catch my flight home. These tickets were not cheap for me; I literally could not afford another. So after recovering from the scramble, I walked to the train station, found the next train to Göttingen on the schedule, waited, and boarded a train I couldn’t afford. This wouldn’t have been the first train I’d hopped, not even the first in Germany, but it had been a while, and I never got over the anxiety of waiting for the moment a train officer boards and starts checking tickets. In the past I’d exit as they entered, or even hide in the bathroom on longer trips — but this day I didn’t have it in me. So I waited anxiously, and when the moment came I explained the situation. I could sense the officer wasn’t having it, but ultimately he just told me next time get a ticket, and let me be.

From that point on, for the last couple hours of the trip, I felt so relaxed. I’d just been through a stress bomb, with all the physical and mental symptoms that come with it, and now I was enjoying a peaceful ride out to visit my friends on the last days of the trip. I realized how ridiculous all that stress had been — how useless and unnecessary. Even if I’d gotten kicked off or ticketed, it wasn’t worth all that. I was reminded that when something doesn’t seem to be working out, eventually it leads to something better. There’s essentially always a way through any missed connection — there’s always another way. So I started writing lines on that train, and in the days visiting my friends I recorded a rough version on GarageBand on the iPad. It’s still a short song, more of a sketch, but it stands as a reminder of that day and those last days of travel — and of the idea that there’s no sense stressing about a missed connection.

Missed connections 
Are little more
Than an open door 
Nothing missed is truly lost
Only substituted 

Missed connections 

That which was meant
To be
Has become
So simply 
Making way to pave the path to
Further possibilities 
Making way to pave the path 
To unseen opportunities

Continued in The Challenge 2018 Part 2 – Songs 14-27