I’m not sure if this counts as cheating in the unwritten #30DaySongChallenge Rule Book, but I’m picking one of my own songs for today. Like a lot of amateur songwriters, my songs have always tended toward the autobiographical, though I’d like to think that the stories and sentiments are universalizable. But even the songs that aren’t about me in some way or another are still meaningful for me, in large part because the process of songwriting is such a private and intimate experience. I feel a much stronger attachment to my songs that I do to any of my other creations– writings, photographs, meals, whatever– though I am not sure I can adequately explain why.
If I were a more prolific (and talented) songwriter, I would love to try the #30DaySongChallenge with the following twist: instead of choosing songs that are already out there each day, you write a new song for each day’s prompt. Some of the prompts would need to be tweaked a bit– for example, instead of choosing “a song from the 80’s,” you would have to write a song that sounds like the 80’s– but I think that just makes the whole enterprise more interesting. So, I’m calling on all you freakishly productive songwriters out there to give it a try!
My song for today is my song, “Heart of Stone.” I’m not positive, but I think I wrote this sometime in the late-90’s, and I played it in regular rotation with several bands I was in over the next decade or so. I don’t think it was about any specific person or event in my life, but it certainly could have been. Here it is:
After I finished graduate school and moved back to Memphis, I stopped playing in bands. (I miss that a lot, but you’ve got to start adulting sometime, I suppose.) So, this song pretty much sat dormant for several years, only coming out of hiding late at night when I found myself around friends, whiskey, and a guitar. Then, in 2011, my good friends Chris Morgan (musician and filmmaker at DarkEnergyMedia) and Dana Gabrion (former Co-Executive Producer of America’s Next Top Model) said “hey, let’s make a video of your song!”
We had to call in a bunch of favors to get this video done on a budget of basically zero dollars. For free locations, we shot at Rhodes College‘s McCoy Theater (thanks David Mason!), the Center for Southern Folklore (thanks Judy Peiser!), the not-downtown-anymore Circa Grill (thanks John Bragg!), the Talbot Heirs hotel that Dana owns (thanks Dana!), and on the Memphis Main Street Trolleys (thanks nobody! ‘Cause we didn’t ask permission to do that!). For free actors, I called on my super-camera-friendly friends Emily Fulmer (in the role of The Homewrecker), Max Maloney (in the role of The Cad), and Marlinee Iverson (in the role of The Jilted). For a free recording, I teamed up with Memphis musician Brian Wood, who has a super comfy home studio and who added some really nice touches to the recording. Chris Morgan did all the camerawork and editing for the video, and Dana Gabrion produced the hell out it. One very long day of shooting and, viola!, I had my very first music video.