We Could Do Anything

We Could Do Anything

our dreams would light the sky ablaze ...

"Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam ..." - The Impressive Clergyman

Kelly and I got married in 1998. I can't believe how thin I was back then. Life and Kelly's cooking have been too kind to me, to say the least.

In 2008, we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. By then, my musical hobby had grown beyond simply making beats and remixing / mashing up vocals from the internet. I had bought myself a guitar. Bill had given me a beat up microphone and I intended to use it (an old SM-57 which is still one of my favorites). I even had some drum pads (actual drums would come later).

That year, I wrote Kelly a song for our anniversary. You, my internet friend, will never hear that song.

It was heartfelt, it was sincere, it was blessedly short, and it was awful. Though it did get me laid. But then it was our 10th anniversary, and we were headed to a ritzy hotel in Nashville for the weekend. The odds were kind of in my favor.

The experience of writing that song, the experience of Kelly telling me over and over again how much she loved it, and the experience of being immersed in the heart of Music City for the weekend took my desire to write songs and record them and planted it in concrete footers a mile deep.

I was gonna do this stuff because I loved it and I didn't give a damn if anyone else in the world liked it or not.

Actually that's pretty much still my attitude about it. Though like anything, it's more fun when you do it well and people actually do like it. What you're listening to is the song from the following year's anniversary in 2009. I'd gotten a little better at it by then.

It's still a little rough ... a lot rough. It's too short, there should be more lyrics, the auto-tune was unnecessary (but at the time it still seemed like a "fresh" effect), the song structure is a little random. The drums are so electronic, they don't groove at all. The inexplicable crickets (I have a thing for crickets ... which I will explore further in next week's post).

All that being the case, I'm still damn proud of it. That's me exhibiting the absolute limit of my musical capabilities circa 2009 and really putting my heart into it.