Volume 8 - Rockin' the Hot One

 Volume 8 - Rockin' the Hot One. This is yet another great album. Every song, like the album before, is a great song. It starts with a great song called We're Free. And the title is exactly what the song is about. And this is a good time for me to explain something. Or maybe I should say it's a good time not to explain something. I'm talking about the lyrics. 

It's one thing to write great compositions of great music. But there's another element involved. And that is the lyrics. Sure it's nice to have lyrics about a true love or a lost love, (both of which I have in my music.) But I remember hearing about some advice Bob Dylan gave to John Lennon.

Everyone knows what a great composer John Lennon was. He and his fellow Beatles made it big with great songs. But what I heard was this: When Bob Dylan met John Lennon early in his career, Dylan gave props to Lennon for his great songs. But he was not so impressed with Lennon's lyrics. 

And if you think about it, early on, anyway, the lyrics were nice, but not deep. Songs like I Wanna Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, Love Me Do, Please Please Me, A Hard Day's Night, etc, were all fantastic songs. They were big hits. They made the Beatles famous. Made them millionaires. 

But after his meeting with Dylan, Lennon's lyrics began to take deeper meanings. Sure he still sang about love and heartbreak. But not just love and heartbreak. You get my meaning.

As for me? My lyrics, like I said, do involve love, and even heartbreak. But that's not all. I too get deeper with lyrics. And thus, my point about not explaining. What I mean by that is my lyrics are meant to be self-explanatory. But that doesn't mean they are clearly self-explanatory.

Take the first song on Volume 8. We're Free. After hearing or reading the lyrics, it may not be clear exactly what it's about. And I'm not going to explain it. Many of my songs could be ambiguous in the meaning. It could be about this, or it could be about that, or it could be about something else. 

It is up to the listener to gauge the meaning of every song I write, especially those songs that are ambiguous. Like We're Free. Treading is another example on this album. And so is Believing. But songs like that are not limited to this album. I have songs like that on all of my albums.

So enough about that. The playlist is as follows;

We're Free 

Treading 

About You 

Believing 

Your Way 

To You 

Hot One 

Try Again 

A Chance 

Make an Offer

Btw, I still write lyrics about love and such. About You, Your Way, and To You are examples of that. After all, if you've been married to the same woman for 30+ years, you're bound to write a few songs about her. So why did I name the album after the song Hot One? I just thought it was a great song, that's all. I never said a song had to have deep meaning lyrics to be a great song, did I?

Volume 7 - Rockin' the Dream

 

After Volume 6 was completed, still no writer's block was setting in. The music was still pouring out. And all original tunes. I had just completed what I considered some of the best music I had ever written, but great music was sill coming out of me. The next song, which is the first song on Volume 7, was so great, I might have even called it a masterpiece. But that category was reserved for only two songs that my friend and I had agreed upon years before. And ever since those days, (which date back to the seventies,) no other song had qualified. 

I might have nominated a song or two since then, but again, my friend would need to second those nominations and we are no longer in touch. Doesn't matter. No one needs another opinion to believe for himself or herself what song is a masterpiece. And for me, the song Dream qualifies. I believed it when I was composing the song. And I still do. I put in lyrics that are reminiscent of Martin Luther King's famous speech. Thus the name Dream. And I named the entire album after that song.

And needless to say, the entire album is great. Once again, every single song is nothing less than a great song. So it's one of my favorite albums to date. But, again, I have a lot of favorites, and this album is most definitely one of them. The playlist is as follows:

Dream

Hollow

Tall Tale

Want to Run

Give It Up

Remember

The Real Thing

On a Roll

In the Future

That number of songs is not an error. This album is the only album I put together that only contains nine songs. It's because when I originally wrote the songs, they were all very long. And because I was at first putting these albums on a 60 minute cassette tape, I was keeping the total running time to that. So when the nine songs totaled 60 minutes I left it at that.

But when I came back to my music recently to revise all my songs, I have rearranged several, and I made most of them much shorter. Some quite literally are half as long as they used to be. So now the total running time for the album is 39 minutes and some seconds. Which now ranks it to be the shortest running time of all my albums. But that's the reason why.

No matter. It's 39 minutes of fantastic music. And the singing? Well, I'll never pretend I can sing. I've said that time and again. But at least it's not bad. Which is the best I might ever hope for. I look at it this way: as long as I can carry a tune and sing in key. And I do.