“OK, Break’s over! Back on your heads!” – that’s a punch line from an old joke about hell. And it almost applies here.
After my last post, I fired up my aged iMac and began the process of finishing production of a song I started recording years ago. Give a listen to “Listen to Your Heart” below.
The Darrell Elmer Rodgers TRIO (with Rick Heyman & Michael Parker) performs this live and at a slightly slower tempo and with a nice intro. But that stretches the song to over 5 minutes. This version is closer to 4.
I wrote the guitar hook on this one back around 2002. The first verse followed a year or so later. But then it languished, waiting for me to figure out where it would go. Funny how hard times make for good songs. I lost my job in in 2015 and the demoralizing process of enduring unanswered applications and remaining unemployed for over a year stood in stark contrast to the encouragement and loving patience of my dear bride and the laughter and joy provided by my daughters and grand children. The experience seemed to crystallize the lyrics in my mind. I guess you could say it’s a song of grateful resignation and hope.
So today, with a new job in a new city, I need now to crank up the creativity work and get back to song writing and, frustratingly, production. On this old slow struggling hardware, recording and production is a bit hellish for me. But even a broken clock gets it right twice a day.
So this guy dies and gets sent to hell where he sees everyone standing in sewage up to their knees, but they’re all chatting, laughing, drinking coffee, and eating delightful pastries and he thinks “this ain’t so bad!”. Suddenly the devil appears and says:
“OK, Break’s over! Back on your heads!”
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