When I write a song the last thing to come is the lyrics. I do the guitar or bass bits first and sing nonsense words & syllables to come up with the melody line. The other day I came up with this song that sounded pretty darn cheerful (Matt said it reminded him of a Spongebob song, which is okay by me, and probably unavoidable since my kids are singing songs from the show all the time), so I thought, what the heck, I’ll write a song about falling in love because it has that kind of sunniness to it. Hey, I’m not ashamed to admit it either – we’ll call this #1 in Lessons Learned from Brendan Benson – its okay to write songs about love.

The funny thing was that I was trucking along, la la la, coming up with some not too corny lyrics, and then because my son was asking me every 15 seconds or so what I was going to name the damn thing, I started thinking it was either going to be called (culling something from the lyrics) The Greatest One of All or Ghostly. But suddenly rereading the lyrics with the title “Ghostly” made me realize that I had just written an entire song about death, not about love. Good thing I didn’t say to Matt “I am using you as inspiration for my song of love” and then come back to him singing about death.

So I guess that in some ways they’re kind of the same thing, and I guess I got a gothy streak. The song is now called Love & Death, and I present it to you here in glorious ipod touch/4track/griffin SmartTalk mic hi-fi – complete with the odd bad note.

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