What's This Music For?

“Turn It Around” was written fairly quickly at the end of January, 2011. I was fooling around on the piano when the chorus chords came to me. With some additional work, the rest of the chords and the melody soon followed, along with the phrase “Get Up”. In a week’s time, the lyrics were mostly written.

I seem to have been writing a lot of “message”-type songs around this period. In fact, I often worried that my lyrics were getting too preachy. Usually, though, when I seem to be preaching to my audience, I’m actually trying to give myself a pep talk.

I wrote the verse chords and melody and some initial lyrics for what would become “Clothesline” in June 2000. I didn’t revisit the song until January 2009, when I came up with a chorus and the riff for the solo section. At that time I also majorly overhauled the lyrics.

I really did knock out a tooth on a clothesline; I believe it was Halloween 1981 or 1982. My uncle and aunt had a clothesline made of a thick metal wire and I ran smack dab into it. Fortunately it was only a baby tooth and the gap in my smile enhanced my Phantom of the Opera costume. In the song, of course, it’s symbolic, but I still don’t know why it came to mind after all those years.

I performed the song solo once or twice before recording the Chameleon Red version in 2012.