…while weeding through my father’s garage years after he passed, I found cassette tapes of songs I recorded in my youth. And just before the 2020 pandemic I also found a reel-to-reel tape from 1972 of songs I had written while traveling in Europe when I was 18. That started me on a journey to re-listen and salvage songs I thought might be pertinent today. Like in gardening, sometimes you separate the strong from the weak, throw out the old and replant, watch, wait, and see what grows. Out of some 70 songs, these 10 or so we cultivated a bit, and then listened carefully as they seemed to take off on their own.
It’s interesting in our youth how we so effortlessly think of things to say, write, and sing. Never knowing how they may blossom as they age…as we age. You never know what a song may mean to someone either. Like a painting, music creates different impressions for each of us. And in nurturing these old songs, it was like painting or gardening, occasionally stumbling across something beautiful — a memory, a moment, an expression, an awakening. But some I had to throw out. They were incomplete, too far out of tune, unresolved. Overall, a collage emerged — sadness, yearning, love, loss, hope, outrage, enlightenment.
So, pandemic be damned, I did find something to do and share during your reign — this simple journey back in time that I hope conveys we are all Master Gardeners of our lives. We do the best we can even though we may come to find, nothing is perfect.
Listen to new releases on the Master Gardener channel. Headed for the Stars, Falling & Maybe in Those Eyes released in January 2021