Of all the new recordings I’ve made since getting back on my feet and into a stable housing situation after finding myself unexpectedly homeless, penniless, and going it alone a couple years ago, this one was the hardest to finish writing and recording.
I was alternatingly convinced it was the best, most important song and lyric I’d ever written, and the most hackneyed, pitiful doggerel imaginable, depending on the time of day.
It’s damned hard emotionally distancing yourself from a song and recording enough to hear it clearly from a technical perspective when the feelings that inspired it are still “hot” and not necessarily fully resolved.
And at the time when I first started fumbling awkwardly away at writing the melody and lyrics that eventually came together in “Home Sick,” it was still not out of the question to find me sobbing to myself and unable to make it all the way through singing some revisions of the verses in recalling the painful real world experiences and situations behind them.
So I did something I seldom used to do: I stopped working on the track for a few days and let myself do a reset instead of grinding more and more intently and self-defeatingly on it.
I owed it to myself, I figured. The lived experiences themselves had been painful and frustrating enough already. Wouldn’t it be a tragedy to punish myself by reliving it all, picking mindlessly at old wounds, and making an agony of it all over again in the retelling?
So I gave myself grace.
And that approach worked splendidly: A couple days of just forgetting about the song completely, even imagining I might just scrap the whole thing rather than lose sleep over it, somehow naturally and effortlessly brought the needed intuitive connections and other developments needed to finish the lyrics and arrangement and to put it all together into the recording for this new single, “Home Sick,” a song about overcoming the awful feeling of being stuck somewhere between longing for anywhere at all in this world to call home and the sense that there’s a kind of sickness of mind and heart at work in America nowadays that seems to threaten the very idea of home.
INSTRUMENTATION
Nylon string acoustic guitar
Steel string acoustic guitar
Piano/Keyboard
Voice
LYRICS
You walk a long and lonely road
With nowhere you’re allowed to go
No place left in this world to call home
There’s always cameras watching you
And posted signs reminding, too
There’s nowhere here where you belong
And all the strangers passing by
Will tell themselves a favorite lie
About the reasons why, it’s true
But all the stars still shine so bright
You can’t deny that space and time
Hold a special place for you, too
So maybe there will be
A beautiful day
For you and me
Yeah, maybe there will come
A beautiful day
For everyone
And all the strangers passing by
Will tell themselves a favorite lie
About the reasons why, it’s true
But all the stars still shine so bright
You can’t deny that space and time
Hold a special place for you, too
So maybe there will be
A beautiful day
Let’s wait and see
Yeah, maybe there will come
A beautiful day
For everyone