Sparks from the Fire

For five years my wife and I had a house at 9000 feet in the mountains of Colorado.  With relatively few neighbors, (I say relatively few because here in NYC we have 10 million) we lived on 5 unmolested acres of wooded land in a mountain paradise, in a house of picture windows, each one framing a gorgeous shot of the mountains that surrounded us.  Bear, elk, fox, deer and other various animal folk visited our yard every morning.  We had bear claw scratches on our wooden deck and outer door frames.  Fun for a couple of New Yorkers who visited regularly.

I had a second recording studio there that also looked out on nature and all its glories and my wife, Julia, ringed the house with bird feeders so that we were a regular mall for birds.  Instead of waking up in the morning to buses and sirens and NYC, we woke to the songs of birds.  And yes, we became bird watchers.

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I was given an assignment (and paid well, I might add) to write a song about being free.  When I heard the title assigned to the task by the client, I secretly groaned in disappointment.  “This song has already been written a thousand times”, I said to myself.  But I took the money and ran with it.

I put off starting the song for days.  The clichés coursing through my brain were deadly to the creative process.  Finally, with little time left, I reluctantly began the process.

I thought, “Well, what’s the biggest cliché in song?”  The answer: “I love you.”  And yet those three little words make up one of the world’s most cherished utterances.  So what makes a cliché a cliché?  No real content, no true meaning, no real stuff behind the words, in short, no truth.

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3/8/09

We had been married for just four months when she got the job.  We were thrilled.  Julia was going to sing at the world famous Palermo Opera.  A dream come true for her.  On top of it, Italy is the paradise of her imagination and dreams.  And she would be there for three whole months!

Groan…  What was I to do for three whole months?  Just married and so soon separated.

And so she flew away.  And I waited.  Two months went by.  Not fun.  But then a dear friend who recognized my loneliness actually gave me the money for a plane ticket.

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