ericprincessdragon

Tag: songwriting

  • 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.

  • Miles Away

    For several years I worked with the county providing audiovisual services – mainly during their routine business meetings. Commissioner meetings, workshops, budget committees. Any instance where the elected officials were set to discuss and vote on county business, I would be there making sure everything was captured on video and audio and streamed live to the public. There were periods where this was the most consistent money gig I had going.

    The commute was nearly 30 miles each way between Port Orford and Gold Beach – coastal highway the whole way, passing multiple state parks, untouched beaches, cliffs dropping straight into the Pacific. It should have been one of the more scenic commutes imaginable.

    I am a night owl and often struggled to balance weeks of late nights with a sudden 8 AM meeting with the commissioners. I would find myself sleep deprived on the way there and on the way home, not the best state to be working or traveling in. By the later part of my time with the county I was often running on autopilot – multitasking through the meetings themselves, working on music mixes or editing videos with the audio feed in one ear, sometimes taking long phone calls or leaving voice messages to friends while the meeting ran in the background. On tired drives home I might be in a total state of detachment, spaced out in far away sleepy thoughts. The drive would pass and I’d find myself home before I even knew it.

    There were days I felt I took that drive for granted entirely – all those breathtaking views of the wild Pacific just passing by unnoticed. Often enough I would pull over and take a moment to calibrate. Just feeling the breeze, looking out to the endless ocean, reminding myself – this is it. Sometimes I’d run out onto the beach or stand at the top of the cliffs above the crashing waves. Other times I’d stop at Sister’s Rock and walk out of sight of the highway and just sit and breathe.

    The song began on one of those drives home. I was coming around the south end of Humbug Mountain – winding roads where long straight stretches suddenly morph into tight turns, speed signs, roadside memorials reminding you to slow down and be careful. It was that passage that snapped me back one day. I had awakened in paradise. Coming around the last bend the ocean came back into view and the sky was brilliant. It became so clear in that moment that I’d been on autopilot – the whole drive up until that point had passed in a flash without me really noticing the sky or the sea. The song just started coming and I started singing – lately I’ve been losing my sense, I’m here sitting at the driver’s wheel but I’m miles miles away.

    The mortality thread in the song wasn’t entirely conscious at the time. All the roads with their twist and turns all leading to the same place. Here today we’re not here to stay. I’ll be there soon, I’ll be right back here on the one track. Looking back I think the connection was more subconscious – that great shock of presence, suddenly feeling so alive and aware, carries with it the recognition of how much time passes while you’re somewhere else. Going in and out of presence felt connected to going in and out of consciousness, in and out of life itself. To be drifted away in thought is still being alive, but in a sense it’s not really living.

    This song was something of a precursor to Body, written at least a couple of years before it. Both songs circle the same territory – the pattern of spending so much time outside of presence, outside of the body, occupied in thought and disconnected from the environment. Body was a more direct reckoning with that. Miles Away was where the realization first started to surface.

    The recording came during a day I spent experimenting with a compact setup for capturing video and audio while traveling – a kind of proof of concept for how I might document performances on the road. I stopped at a few locations, dealt with some overexposure issues and audio problems along the way. My last stop just before sunset was Sister’s Rock. I played through a few songs up on the cliffside as it got cold and the light faded, playing until almost dark. It was one of the last takes and the most usable. Sister’s Rock is one of my favorite stops along that drive – I’ll often go there at night with the dogs, especially on a stormy or moonlit night when I can hike out to the edge of the cliffs and down to the beaches without a flashlight. I’ve written and finished songs there more than once. It felt like the right place for this one.

    "Miles Away"

Lately I've been losing my sense
I'm here sitting at the driver's wheel
But I'm miles
Miles away

All the roads with their twist and turns
All leading to the same place

Back in the seat, looking all around me
I can't believe I'm almost halfway home
Ocean meets the sky
Great stars shine their light
My body is here in paradise
But I'm miles
Miles away
Miles away from here

We're here today we're not here to stay
And I just can't believe it
All the years all the folks
They're just passing by
I'll be there soon
I'll be right back here on the one track
I'll be there soon
I'll be right back here on the one track

Lately I've been losing my sense
I'm here strumming on this (pink) guitar
But I'm miles
Miles away from here

  • 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.

  • Gutter Baby

    In all my travels, never have I met a gnarlier bunch of traveling folks than the “gutter punks.” I once got off a bus in New Orleans and immediately got heckled by one across the street yelling, “Hippie! Give me money!” Hitchhiking around the U.S. and Canada, I met quite a few – jamming, sleeping and hanging around on the streets, trying to catch lifts along the way.

    Inspired by people I met on the street around Montreal, Humboldt & Mendocino counties, this song is an amalgamation of stories I’ve heard from these folks, some of my own experiences traveling, and some inspiration for a happy ending from someone who made it out from the streets into a “normal” life.

    My first demo for this song was completed in January 2024 as part of a song-a-week challenge. Though most of it was written then, some of the lines go back to a dusty notebook I filled around 2014-2015 when I was hitchhiking around the states real heavy. I was looking for notes for another song when I found these words. I scrapped most of what I had written then, but the core idea was there – the story of a “Gutter Baby.”

    Just a baby
    Fourteen years old
    Scared to go back home
    Take your chances
    Hiding in the streets
    And learning to survive
    Starting a new life as
    A gutter baby

    Find some punks on the street
    Who take you under their wing
    They get you high and teach you to get by and you start traveling
    In every new town new trouble with the same struggles
    You graduate from the bottle to the pipe and to the needle
    Oh gutter baby
    Gutter baby

    Gutter baby
    Rabid on the street
    How did the world forsake you
    Gutter baby
    They got you hooked
    Hooked on poison hooked on violence
    Hooked on crime giving every reason
    For them to jack you up
    Gutter baby

    The cops know just who to fuck with when they spot you on their beat
    They’ll take any excuse to pluck you off the street
    They don’t care whether they lock you up or drive you to the edge of their town
    And they know that no ones gonna trip if they beat the shit out of
    A gutter baby
    Gutter baby

    Not a baby
    You’re growing old
    With dreams of your own
    Done with trouble
    All the drugs and drama
    All the death and all the trauma

    You leave it in the past
    You’re cleaning up your act
    You’re going to be a dad
    Now you have yourself a chance
    To give a love you never had
    A baby
    Your baby

    It ain’t easy to build when you’ve been beaten down
    And thought you’d be the next young punk to end up in the ground
    You’ve been cast aside abused and brutalized and didn’t know why
    But all the pain and trouble means nothing when you look in those eyes
    And see no struggle
    No fear
    No struggle
    Just a baby