Desperate Grasp


I remember hearing The Smiths for the first time. It was in a record store when vinyl was on the wane, cassettes were on top and CDs were gaining popularity.

It was "This Charming Man." I wasn't sure what it was about exactly, but it sounded so different than what I was used to hearing on the radio that I immediately wanted to hear more.

Many years later, I started playing guitar and writing songs of my own. The Smiths always had sort of a handmade feeling. Not raw like punk, but not slick like the normal radio pop songs the DJs constantly played that said "nothing to me about my life."

I wanted very much to make a song that sounded raw and intelligent and funny and swinging, like The Smiths at their best.

I liked all of their albums, but for me "Louder than Bombs" was their best because it felt B-side-ish, which I think it was to some extent. I listened to it probably too loud on whatever passed for headphones back when I was in high school, and "Rubber Ring" still speaks to me just as clearly and passionately as it did back then. (Click the link to read Jake Brown's post from 2003. Can that year be right? Wow.)

I had been traveling for work more than usual, and I noticed sometimes you would sit next to someone fairly chatty who confided in you maybe as a stranger more than they would someone they actually knew. Or maybe I was that person.

In the final days of a failing company
A business man sat on the plane next to me
He said there'd been questions, irregularities,
Still he'd never done anything knowingly illegal

He met a girl when he was twenty one
He never quite got her face out of his mind
He looked her up lately and her life had come undone
And maybe she'd be happy now to see him

I remember those two verses coming easily. Then the chorus, which sounds overly dramatic but also true.

It's a desperate grasp to find anything that lasts
It's a desperate grasp to find anything that lasts

It's a desperate grasp to find anything that lasts

Longer than a young girl's smile...

I thought it would be funny for someone to tell secrets in his sleep, but instead of a lover's name, etc., it would be formulas for making a proprietary plastic.

He nodded off and he spoke in his sleep

Reciting formulas from memory

Exotic plastics and dense French poetry

In an accent that was hauntingly familiar...

When it came to the bridge, I used a snapped off piece of progression that I had made a year or more before trying to imitate part of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World." Actually, it was Nirvana's cover version. I used a noise/synth app on my phone to do the little solo.

We landed and we walked up the gate

He was heading for the city and running late

He turned to me with pain in his eyes

He said "I hope you lead a life without compromise."

Sort of like a charming man who has made his share of mistakes trying to help a stranger not make the same questionable decisions.

Lonely Robot Boy (Horse Called Tomorrow)

I was getting ready for work the other day when the phrase, "I'm just a lonely robot boy..." popped into my head.

At first I thought it was a stray idea that would soon fade. But other related phrases kept coming on the drive to work. 

"I've admired your hinges and servos for some time now," was another line, which made me imagine the robot boy had somehow discovered a female robot. "I admire the chrome of your brow" was the second part to that couplet, but it didn't fit together like I expected.

Then I looked for a place for the robot boy to live. My first thought was an astroid, like in the original Twilight Zone episode, "The Lonely." I spent some time trying to write lyrics to explain how the robot had been abandoned by humans, and so on. Finally, I decided that the robot could just imply his back story, not spell it out.

I'm just a lonely robot boy
Stuck on this forgotten rock
I'll share my battery pack with you
And my charging dock

I've always liked the line, "We'll be together, with a roof right over our heads / We'll share the shelter, of my single bed" from Bob Marley's "Is This Love?" So I adapted it to my robot's circumstances. Sharing a battery pack and charging dock might be the most generous thing a robot boy could do.

I've made my home
In the wreck of this ship
Picked you up on the radar
A curious little blip

I like your hinges
And I admire how
The sunlight caresses
The chrome of your brow

Years ago, my wife and I were watching a movie with our friends Brad and Julia. I think it was the live TV remake of Fail Safe back in 2000. Wow, that's a weird phrase, "Back in 2000." Anyway, there was a scene where the military is tracking a dot on the radar. Other dots are shown in pursuit of the first dot. "Poor little dot," said Julia. That stuck with me.

So the robot boy sees a blip, maybe after hundreds of years not seeing anything on the radar, and it gives him hope. How would a robot boy compliment a robot girl? I would start by admiring her hinges and chrome accents. That's just me.

These mountains remind me
Of a paperback book I read
About a cowboy
And the horse he called Tomorrow

They wandered through the desert
And no matter where they went
They found empty houses
Ghost towns filled with sorrow

There's more than a little WALL-E influence to the imagery and storytelling in this song, but I also wanted to bring in differences, like my robot boy reading paperbacks instead of watching VHS tapes. The books were presumably left behind by humans when they either died out or left for greener planets. I decided to merge that idea with a passing tribute to America's "Horse with No Name."

I already mentioned Bob Marley. I wanted to borrow a line from one of his songs, but I couldn't find a convincing way to use the line I mentioned above. So I turned to "No Woman, No Cry," another beautiful song.

Maybe this isn't the end
Here, little darling, don't shed no tears
Maybe someday
We'll see other suns
The nights can get so cold
But you've got my hand to hold

I hope you enjoy my song. If so, please pass it along to others.

Cuba - In early 2017 we were able to travel to Cuba to visit my wife's extended family in the Guantanamo city area. 

We stayed at the Hotel Guantanamo, which is inside the city. It has an open air lobby, just like resorts I've visited for work in Mexico and Dominican Republic. But it has a more urban vibe. There's an elementary school on one side, a park/square at the front and a neighborhood behind. And it's not near the ocean.

My brother-in-law, his son and I played music in the lobby and out on the dining patio. We took 3 guitars that we gave to churches in the area a day or so before we left.

One of the highlights for me was being able to play a song with my brother-in-law one night in a second floor restaurant. An excellent singer and guitar player was performing that night in the restaurant, and he entertained us with traditional songs, plus some of his originals.

He heard that we were musicians, so he kindly asked if we wanted to play a something for him. Well, we just happened to have our guitars in the trunk of the 1950s Pontiac parked on the street below. Pretty cool. We only played one song, "Shaving and Daydreaming," restraining ourselves from taking over the gentleman's gig. From the blank stares we received from the folks around us, our Americana sound must have seemed pretty foreign to Cubans.

Later in the week, we traveled to a an ocean resort in Guardalavaca. At a rest stop along the way, a troubadour played songs. Both musicians are featured in the video and their interpretations of "Guantanamera" are the soundtrack.

At the resort, a Canadian woman told us she and her husband had been coming to Cuba for many years, and we were the first Americans she had met there.

I've heard people say that they would like to visit Cuba before it's Americanized. 

I understand what they mean. There's almost no advertising. No fast food. No seat belts in the old cars. Buses are pulled by semi-trailers. Bikes and motorcycles compete on the road with cars. Riding in a horse drawn carriage is not a novelty there. It's a legitimate transportation option. And that's in the city! Everywhere there are kids walking to and from school in their uniforms. 

Even if relations were completely normalized overnight, I don't think Cuba will be Americanized anytime soon.

It would be nice to have some decent ketchup in the hotel restaurants, though. They call it ketchup, but it's really some very thin, watery stuff that only hints at the real thing. I think if we go again, the next time I'll take a bag of Heinz Ketchup packets to leave behind. Who knows. I might start a... revolution.