A Pocket Full of God

A rare repost, from two years ago, but it is a summation of the way I feel about our veterans, and about one veteran in particular, my great uncle. 

I knew a man from South Jersey. He was the sweetest, most lovable old fellow you would ever want to meet. He'd been a welder who built great ships, but an accident had rendered his leg lame. Still, he could always be seen walking the main road in his town, usually with frequent stops to talk to every one who know him -- which was, really, everyone. He was my Great Uncle Vince.

He had been a soldier in World War II. In fact, he had been in the D-Day landing. Sometimes, he would tell me stories, cautioning me not to tell my mother -- he feared she would be shaken up by the details. But I think he believed that every little boy should know a little of what war was. Maybe he was right.

In short, if you ever saw the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, you got the truth. The stories my Uncle Vince told me matched that opening in such detail, I would have placed a bet that Spielberg had interviewed my uncle, though he had died many years before the film was made.

But the best story I ever heard was this:

The Pot of Old Socks at the End of the Rainbow

Artistic fulfillment. So stinking elusive. You just have to fall back on the old cliche: the fulfillment just has to come from the doing; not the having done; not the accolades.

My band played on Saturday night to a pretty packed room. The place is biggish, too. Usually, we get a lot of positive feedback -- people dancing and singing along; a lot of smiles; a lot of high-fives when we come out with a song someone is surprised we are playing. We're usually pretty good at picking them, especially in that particular room.

Not last night. Last night, with the exception of a few moments, we might as well have been playing to a room full of cacti. It was like serving tennis balls into a hanging blanket. So what did we do? We played. We decided just to have fun. We sort of did, but, it was one of those nights you look forward to wrapping up.

Great American songwriter, Jimmy Webb -- who "gets it."

With my own original music, I find that, with Internet radio play -- Spotify, Radio Airplay, etc. -- that people are responding very favorably. Hundreds are people are bothering to become "fans" of my songs, from New York to Great Britain to Singapore and Japan.

And the Winner Is . . .

A friend and former student of mine just posed a question on Facebook: Who is the best songwriter of the last twenty years?

I've been thinking about this for three days and it's difficult to say -- not because I haven't liked any songs in the last twenty years, but because I'm not sure that I can think of a lot of actual songwriters who have written over that period, outside of the established ones (like Elton John, who is doing some of his best work ever, even though there is not a lot of buzz about it).

What it comes down to, for me, is that there are three kinds of people who put together songs.