Reflections of My Life

No, this isn’t going to be one of those posts that gets super heavy and looking for answers and stuff.

In 1984 I started taking guitar lessons at the behest of my Dad getting tired of me playing air guitar or using a cane that belonged to my grandmother. I also started writing pretty cheesy lyrics. The first song I wrote lyrics for was called Red Lights. It was about a woman who just never wanted to stop. And we’re not talking about the driver’s seat.

If it wasn’t sex, it was metal anthems. Or violence. Sometimes I wrote ballads.

Everything I wrote though was such a ripoff of what I was listening to at the time. Maybe if music had actually been put to the lyrics I might feel differently about them. I had a lot of melodies but again, so derived from what I was listening to. I wrote close to 200 songs of just lyrics while in high school. After I graduated, the ideas dried up. Once in a while something would pop up and it was those that I preferred as I felt the lyrics were better.

Sadly, 2 songs of the 240 I had written back then got a chance to be recorded. Again I probably only had a dozen songs that I had an idea of music for so the potential was there.

Back to the 2 I recorded. One I am very proud of and the other, yeah not so much.

Scars Too Deep To Heal, which I mentioned in a previous post, is the one I am proud of.

Sadist? I shudder at how sick I was back then. The recording is very noisy but it was just me and a drummer and we just went for it. The drummer was really good though so I can’t fault him for the noise. My guitar and vocals? 🤢🤢🤢

The original notebook containing all the lyrics I wrote up until 1999 completely vanished. Thankfully no one will ever get to read the lyrics to Headmaster, Screwdriver, Bonesmasher, and many other “classics “.

One I was proud of that needed some work was one called Farewell my Friend. The idea behind it was based off of a scene from Red Dawn. It was the scene where one of the Wolverines betrayed the group and the price he paid for it.

I even wrote a long epic called Heartattack! It really was a song about the different stages of a heart attack. Not like I knew what the stages were or anything.

Since 1999, I’ve written a small handful of songs that a few have music to and I was able to demo. Those I am proud of as they speak more about my faith.

In 2019, I took what demos I had and made my own DIY CD. It also features 4 songs that I played guitar on in a band I was in back in 2005. I didn’t write the songs but I did contribute a riff or two.

I have a typed up list of the songs I wrote lyrics for and I have shared them with friends and I try to remember what certain songs were about.

Maybe one day I can take some of those titles and rewrite the songs.

Well, maybe not certain ones. 😁