Murder

There are few things that are as generally bumming to me as the day the snow melts. It’s like a Monday-times-three. But it is.

I sent Kip a first-run sketch of a tune I’m working on right now. I won’t post the name of the tune right now, but it is a murder story with a twist. Murder stories without a twist aren’t very much fun, but murder stories with a great twist – to me anyway – are great, because the stakes are at their highest.

I decided to entrust this tune to Matlock. I don’t usually take him my best “love song” hooks, because I think he is jaded on the idea (though I think I am finished with the idea) and into a specific simplicity in which I don’t really enjoy indulging with those not very close to me. He did, however, defend several high profile criminal cases in his practicing days, and has the practical experience with which he can support the song.

I brought the idea to him late last year, and for three weeks we suffered the process of all-but-literally questioning and cross-examining in an effort to establish the facts of the tune with a very methodical precision. I wrote basic melody and chord structure on Monday, and we began the lyric on Tuesday night. We continue a slow and careful process of removing logical holes and those issues that might defy “suspension of disbelief” as we proceed.

Tuesday night, in a moment of inattentiveness to his normally reserved writing posture, Matlock became comfortable enough to accidentally spout off the “m0ney line”… the line that sets up the “big picture” idea of the tune. He has failed to do this in the now four months we have been writing together, and I’m tickled at him for having crossed that threshold. So far, so good. But more than anything, I am proud of a man twenty-five years my senior for opening up enough to say something out loud that might not just sustain a song, but right now appears to make it.

For the record, I was never much of a story songwriter. That was until an old friend, who used to read this blog but I am pretty sure no longer does, one night told me that one of my best qualities was the way I told stories. I initially sort of "aww shucksed" the comment, but it soon thereafter changed a lot of things for me. It continues to do so. Here’s to the tune, and hoping that it’s as good as we think it is.