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;
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?
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