Thoughts From The Townedger-May

Two more songs done yesterday.  The new one is called May Not Be The Next Time and the other a revisit of Faygo, basically the latter done as a slower song but probably will be used for a song on Townedger Radio (3rd Wed. Night on Lucky Star Radio at Midnight).  The session did one thing, it kept me from putting another 200 miles on my car going to a town and finding all of the thrift stores being bought out.

Rod Albaugh brought a couple of his guitars up at work and I got to play his black Ovation Acoustic and fell in love with it instantly.   Something out of the blue and basically to see if I can actually sing songs with somebody new and we hit it off quite nice. I'll try to get back together with him this summer and do a few more guitar songs.  We'll see what happens but for fun, it was nice to sing Dear Lisa in front of somebody.

While Texas and Oklahoma got hit big time by major floods, we escaped this month with below average rainfall.  Sometimes I wonder if paying 8 thousand to waterproof the basement finally convinced Mother Nature to go somewhere else.  Last two years of May weather we got kicked in the teeth so I think we were due a more subdued May.  Then again I'm not a fan of rain.

I guess we have yet another cat to deal with outside, lucky us.  Bad enough to have Callie around getting into things but we have a three legged blackie which my brother calls Rocky.  While he feeds both cats, the one I care more is Callie who has been in this yard the past half year and shows no signs of moving on.  While I tend to go BOO and watch Rocky head for the hills, Callie knows me well enough to look down her nose and purrs. She loves me.  And since I don't trust the so called no kill shelters around here, I basically let her hang around.   She's really not that bad of a cat.

The Tyrus Paraphernalia reunion of this month is the highlight of the month although a couple guys weren't there, mainly Mike Swearingen and Doug Bonesteel but in theory the main offenders were there and it was great to see each other again.  I believe we were friends first before band members which is why I look at this band differently. Dennis Lancaster lives out of state so having him here was a rare delight to see.  As long as we're all alive, band talk of getting back together again will always make the news on a slow day.  No problem of jamming on a weekend or doing a new song together, but life will never enable us to quit our day jobs of starving ourselves playing a 20 dollar gig at the local Sports bar and competing with ten different sports channels at the same time.  But if we can all get together to remember the good times once in a while, I consider that to be a band reunion. 

Another good idea was to show the source of the lyrics of Townedgers songs that I written over the years and decided to show them off in various stages.  Not all are greatest hits, but rather the songs that I enjoy singing and can play them without messing up.  I could flood the blog with plenty of them but I think if I just add one or two per month, you'll begin to understand how The Townedgers sound and how I write things up. Revisions and crossing unwanted lyrics out in favor of other words that might fit the song.  I don't write as much as I used to, but there's still a backlog of lyrics that could fit into musical ideas. Which is how May Not Be A Next Time came up, the words were written a while ago, perhaps during Forthcoming Trains or No Exit. But it was recorded quite quickly.  It had, I have forgotten how the song went already.  Life is like that when you hit 54, 30 years ago, I could remember the melody a lot better.  The hope is to continue to write new songs and see if they too can stand the test of time.  But you know it's been 32 years ago that I did Town Edge Rock. I don't forsee myself around for the 30th anniversary of Forthcoming Trains. I might be haunting the old Route 66 road somewhere in Arizona.

In two weeks, it will be the 40th anniversary of me going up to Michigan and meeting up with Jeanette Ratliff, a girl that took away my heart and soul but never came much after 1976.  She is of the Jeanette 15 Years Later song, which I'm sure I'll revisit that one on the summer tour.  And I consider her to be the worst all time GF that I ever had, not because of her and who she became but rather me wasting those years of waiting for her to join up with me down here.  The misconceptions of love and when you're a teenager, you have better things to do than wait around for somebody who lived far away.  She's ancient history now, the bitterness and anger of those events and seeing her walk down the aisle with somebody else, to which All Over Now was thought up and given to them as a wedding present was the best gift I ever gave to anybody. But that song lasted longer than her marriage and still remains a fun song to do. I'm sure she's a grandma now and living better, but if I know now of the events that happened back then, Jeanette would have never been a second thought. Teenagers make bad choices when it comes to first love.  Only the very rare remain together through the years.

I'd write more but the yard needs to be mowed.  I'll be back next month.