10Kmiles.mp3

I've been a guitar player since I was 13 and I don't like to think about how long that's been. All those years I played acoustic six and twelve-string guitar. My favorite instrument is my Martin D-25 six-string which I picked up in 1986. In 2001, I was feeling flush, so I bought myself a Roland VG-88 guitar modeler and a new fender strat, thus bypassing electric guitar and going straight to electronic. I've had hours and hours of bliss exploring the VG-88 and adapting my technique to the Fender's fretboard. Out of all this experimentation, I produced an arrangement and elaboration of an Elizabethan love song called "Turtle Dove". I learned this song from a record my parents had when I was a child. When I checked with them after recording this, I discovered that my recollection of the melody had been imperfect. My parents didn't remember the tune perfectly either, and neither of us could come up with many lyrics. The following is what I remembered:

 Fare thee well my dear, I must be gone
 And leave you for a while
 If I will away, I'll come back again
 If I go ten thousand miles, my dear
 If I go ten thousand miles

 

Since this tune is a duet for electronic guitar. I renamed it to "10Kmiles" which nods toward what i had thought was the original title, but gives it a 21st century flavor.

My mp3 is here. It's 5922699 bytes for only 148 seconds of music. I had to encode it at 320K to get something that didn't sound horrible.  I think that was due to the encoder I had available.  I could probably do better now at a lower bandwidth, but I have long since lost the original Cubase tracks in a head crash.

The next element in the song's genesis was an appreciation of my parent's marriage. My father died in February 2009, and I did a lot of thinking about his life. One of the things I saw was that Dad had practised restraint in relations with my mother, and she had done the same with him. Neither parent was a perfect human being. (Sorry Mom :) But they stayed together for 50 years, in spite of some very rough times, by making allowances for each other's weaknesses. (As well as leveraging each other's strengths.)

The final chunk of grist for the mill was my falling in love with a woman who acted as a caregiver after my heart surgery. Unfortunately, she was engaged to a guy who also gave unselfishly to help me through a very difficult time. So the lyric also refers to my keeping my feelings to myself for the sake of my friends' relationship. Also unfortunately, that didn't work. I couldn't live up to the ideals expressed in this tune. That's a whole other song I may write someday.

You are welcome to remix this work, consistent with the license. The raw audio is linked to above. If you want the whole project, drop me a line.

The song that emerged just stated my regret. I hadn't really thought it through, so the roadblock of hard problems stopped the song dead in its tracks. I chewed on it subconsciously for a couple of weeks before this lyric broke through. It's a (very) partial litany of the things I see standing in the way of peace and love - the ideals of my youth. I wrapped a new tune around the words, and as I did, I was moved to put in an outer layer reference to "Turn! Turn! Turn!" This early 60s antiwar song written by Pete Seeger, with lyrics largely from the old testament Book of Ecclesiastes was an expression of those ideals that I was exposed to very early. (I had actually known the tune for a couple of years when the Byrds did their cover in 66 or 67.) Wrapping that up resulted in an optimism sandwich. With "to everything there is a season" at the beginning and end to serve up the faith in balance and the future, the middle part could express my pessimism in a better context.

For me this song answers the question "how do you get your youthful optimism back?" You discover you never lost it, and you hang on to it come hell or high water.

Thanks Pete.