As I’ve noted before, I’ve been blessed to come together with two musicians more talented than myself and form a band, which we call Third Moment.
We spent a few days in February recording some songs in the drummers basement. I moved my digital audio workstation over to his house and we set up a bunch of mics and ran a ton of cables and played our little hearts out.
We did all that for two reasons. One because it’s fun. The other is that we hope to get some paid gigs and most folks want a demo and a media kit.
I spent a good two weeks mixing the material (after moving the DAW back to my house) and put together a little demo we hope to begin shopping around in the next few weeks.
We also created a myspace page where those who so chose can listen to the tunes at will.
Right now there are three instrumental tracks and one song with lyrics.
Two of the instrumental tracks are songs I made up in early ‘08 as part of a project I hoped to record by myself. I was happy the band took to those and others from that project. The third instrumental (What Comes Next) we made up on the spot at practice one day. That’s always a good challenge.
The lyrical song (Inside the Enigma) is another of those songs I wrote a long time ago as a young fella trying to find a path to follow. The specifics behind the song are as follows:
I was 21 or so and had met a couple of freshmen girls at school through some mutual friends. One of them, Melissa, was this bright and fresh, but self-doubting type who came from a well-to-do family down east. I think her dad was an attorney in the small sandhills town she was from.
She was very worried that she wasn’t living up to her parent’s image of what she should be, and was thinking about quitting school and going home. She was very down, and I felt limiting her horizons because she hadn’t begun to take responsibility for herself.
I wrote this poem one afternoon and gave it to her right before she left:
You know that fear is an instinct born of hate
So turn about in your sycophantic rage
If you’re old enough to die
Then you’re old enough to play
So take your fear and generate a way
If I told you fear shows in the lines upon your face
Would you take stock inside the moments that you’ve saved
And if you’re trying to find a definition of the age
Confusion will be the emotion you display
Because inside the enigma
There is always change
Look to foundations they will all remain the same
Inside your mind
Is infinite room to play
And you cannot allow it to be force taken away
Stoic image of the age forget their imposed cage!
Most of all I hope you see
The goal of life is to be happy
I never saw her again after that spring day in 1993. Later that summer, I shared the poem with my best friend Brooks, my soul brother who took so much time back in those days sharing his knowledge of guitar with me. He asked me if he could take the lyrics and write a song for his band. I didn’t hesitate in saying yes and giving him a copy of the words I had scribbled down.
My life went for shit, not for the first or last time, shortly after that and I left school and found myself working in the grinding mill. I think one day in the spring of 1994 I came home from work and Brooks, whom I had not spoken to in several months, had called and left me a message. The message consisted of him reciting the poem.
I hadn’t even thought about the words in the mean time, so I replayed the message several times, jotting the lyrics down on paper. I spent the next few days working out some chords and redoing the lyrics into the form you hear.
It’s amazing how ideas can never really die. Now 15 years later, this song sees the light of day for the first time.
Talking about it