Steemit Open Mic Week 58 entry - Voices (original song)

If you ever find yourself writing a song like this about yourself, stop what you are doing immediately. By all means finish writing the song and keep it if it's good, but stop what you are doing in life that made those lyrics seem like a sensible way to think.

I wrote this song when I was nineteen. I was holed up in a practice room at the Armed Forces School of Music for my required daily three hour practice session, but I didn’t get a lick of guitar practice done. A little nugget of a song idea came to me, and within about 20 minutes I had a full song written. For the rest of my practice session I just kept playing my new song over and over, hammering the melody down right where I wanted it. The lyrics weren’t abstract, they weren’t fiction. It had just happened, and after I nailed the song down I went down the hall to my girlfriend’s practice room so I could play her the song I had just written about her.

This was back when the only way I knew how to write was about my own feelings. I blame grunge for that. Nowadays I prefer getting into other people’s heads when I write lyrics, or simply writing with striking metaphors that are mysterious even to me. This song was written with the stupidly innocent belief that everything was going to be okay. The song was earnest at the time, but now I consider it to be sarcastic. I’ve considered calling it “Voices (Ballad of Denial)” to reflect this, but I don’t want people to think I mean “slow song” ballad when I actually mean “story” ballad. “Voices” is just snappier, like the song itself.

I never really play this song live, as it misses a lot when it’s just me on acoustic guitar. When I wrote it, I recorded it on my 4-track tape recorder with a shitty drum loop, an acoustic guitar part, a jazzy guitar solo, upright bass, and a PHENOMENAL piano part played by a fellow soldier at the School of Music. I’m going to do a new studio recording of it that does the song justice, but I cannot play piano anywhere near the level that my buddy did on that original demo years ago. He has since played with the likes of Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, and he dropped off of Facebook a while back. I’ve got to find a piano player that can throw down like that before I can get a new recording going. In the meantime, here’s the song performed solo acoustic, with a more jaded heart than the one that created it 21 years ago.