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(BTW - If you watched the VLOG above, "Sea Colony" and "Bethany Beach" are located in Maryland, just so you know!)  This song was actually written quite a few years ago, while I was attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA.  Boston is freezing cold for about 8 months of the year so I spent a lot of time inside of apartments writing music. Second Stories seemed an appropriate name for the EP that History is on, since most of the songs on it were in fact written on the second story of an apartment in downtown Boston.     

As you’ll find out I love good lyrics and good coffee and throughout this album experience I hope that I’ll get to show you some things that can give you a deeper connection with lyrics and the stories in this experience will uplift you and inspire you and make your heart a bit lighter.  

This song is about having to leave someone that you care about.  Time and circumstance will eventually effect us all and we will have to say goodbye.  But we are blessed with a wonderful thing called memory.  Remembrance is a such a wonderful thing.  Sometimes all you can do is light a candle on a windowpane, look out at the black night sky and remember the person.  That’s what history is about.  

It was recorded at Berklee College of Music.  Mixed by Matt Champlin. We would goof off in the studio because we were so tired.  We would record until 6AM and just get slap-happy (you know when you're so tired you literally start laughing about everything). One night it was about 4 in the morning and Matt put auto-tune at full blast while I sang Cher’s “Do You Believe in Life After Love” as loud as possible.  We were laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe.  The auto-tune was cranked so high even my laughing was in key.  That recording is somewhere on a console at Berklee College of music  .Oh autotune…..

Although I do always enjoy a nice auto-tuned laughing session, I do put a lot of effort into my lyrics. That’s the part of the song I truly believe is most important.  What is a song other than a vessel with which to communicate a truth or idea?  If the lyrics are thrown together carelessly, it’s kind of like a really well wrapped dog poop.   Sure, it appears to be wonderful, but when you get through the outside, it isn’t really all that great.  I always strive to know what a songwriter mean when they wrote a lyric.  Having made this the focus of my college degree really had an influence on my musical tastes.  I started to appreciate writers like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor and Leonard Cohen who sometimes don’t have the most commercially appealing sound (except James, his beautiful voice sounds like buttah!) but when you listen to the lyrics and find out what they meant, it’s mind blowing.  

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The three levels of listening:  

The first level, you listen to the song, you enjoy the music and maybe sing along with the chorus.  You let the song as a whole create a mood or a feeling and you get pleasure or relatability through that feeling.  It’s wonderful.  This is the way most people listen to music and it’s completely fine to listen this way.  

At the second level, you begin to notice the lyric a little more.  You may have specific instances in your life that a certain lyric conjures up.  Imagery, emotions, moments and pieces of your cumulative experiences come to the surface, as if being knocked loose out of your spirit by the words of the song.  People who listen this way tend to have a deeper and more intimate emotional connection with the song because of how specifically they meditate on it’s words and how the music carries and amplifies those words.  

The third level takes the most time but is by far the most rewarding.  This is usually only the most avid music lovers, sometimes bordering on obsessive listeners and artists themselves.  You listen to the lyrics carefully and dissect every line and try to discern every single meaning of every verse and chorus.  Listening to the song you hang on every meaning as you listen, like a carefully choreographed dance. You find out from the artist themselves the meaning of the song and then you can take the meanings you initially thought the song was about, compare them to what the artist actually meant and see the two views, side by side. This is the ultimate understanding of a song and when you’re able to find out what the artist actually meant, it’s the “AHA” moment.  It’s beautiful and rewarding.  It’s not always necessary to enjoy a song or even have a deep closeness with a song, but it’s my personal favorite way of enjoy the beautiful and strange God-given gift we call "music".