Lyrics

Pretty self explanatory.

Written as a song, this is the story of a stereotypical hick who encounters an alien.

Beautiful Faces works as a poem, read aloud, and as a song. The beautiful faces alluded to by the poem refer to people who I chanced upon and who seemed to have a very pretty face, or who I remember as beautiful. Those who I remember as being beautiful tend to be more plain when I look at their photographs from the time when I thought them to be beautiful.

This little number is a collection of old expressions, strung together into some kind of strange song.

I've used the name Gunshy for various ideas. While strumming around with my Gibson and working on a pensive little number, I had a series of vague images and thoughts describes by these words. They don't exactly flow like most lyrics, but with the song they seem to fit well.

Like parts of Ocean, Howling uses a superbly crafted limerick structure; huh. But, aside from that, I still like it.

Miss Maple's Mystery is a short, fun song I wrote a number of years ago.

This was written from the point of view of a new al-Qaeda recruit. I was trying to understand their point of view, and imagined what this fictious person must believe.

I do not support al-Qaeda, and I do not consider their efforts to be righteous.

I wrote ocean while sitting in traffic in downtown Seattle. The astute reader will notice the few mermaid parts have a nice limerick format. Now that's high class poetry.

This was written as a song, inspired by a tragic event.

Peace at Home is supposed to be a positive reflection that people can have on tumultuous situations.

Ray in the Sun is a contemplation of a photograph.

I wrote Reversal to be a hard, emotionally-thorny piece. I set out writing the poem as a set of lyrics, though finished it off as just a poem. It works better as lyrics, though, because a straight reading comes out a little too dry.

The theme I wanted to address was the idea that a person may be burdened by a guilt over some matter, but on a closer inspection of the events, determine that they actually have nothing to feel guilty about and instead were played as a pawn. In effect, the person reverses their opinion on that matter.

While one could read into this, the fact is that I wrote this driving home from the store on a Monday afternoon and wondering: did I really drink the coffee that morning I brewed on Saturday?

Sci/Fi (with Hooters!) started out as a comedic screenplay, and this was supposed to be the introductory theme song.

I actually have an entire set of lyrics based on this one song, which is just plain wrong. Apparently, I'm prone to do this because Single White Horse wasn't the first, second, or even tenth time I've tried to pry a set of poems out of one half-way decent one. Horse isn't that good, but I like the tune, the top two lines and the first two lines of the chorus so much that I wanted to post it.

This was suppose to be some life-to-death transitional piece, but that is a pretty far mark and this song fell way short.

To put these lyrics in their proper context, you have to envision me driving on some freeway through the mountains, screaming these rhythmically challenged words in a grating voice and at the top of my lungs. The first part is a bright, hopeful, playful banter while the latter part is a disillusioned, grunge Jesus.