About
Key G, Tempo 85
June 25, 1978/Summer of 1981
This song is one of many musical mutts in this collection. The first verse was written in 1978, and the additional verses and the bridge were written in the summer of 1981, after I began dating my future wife Debbie. The music was written in March of 2022. This is the first official love song in the set. The lyrics are deliriously romantic, which was typical of the period for me. I was a hopeless romantic who wrote reams of love poems for Debbie, and would put them in an envelop and deliver them weekly to the mailbox of her family’s home, probably scaring the hell out of her parents. Like most love poetry written by hormone ravaged teenage boys, those reams I produced were mostly sappy and highly embarrassing. For this reason, I debated whether to include any love songs at all in this project, but after much soul searching, I decided I had no choice.
Guitar and keyboard parts were created in GarageBand, and then exported to Logic Pro X. I like the use of the French Horn and the strings. It reminds me of many of the lush sound collages on “Imperial Bedroom” by Elvis Costello, one of my favorite albums from the early 80s. The song, along with the other unabashedly lovestruck ditty “Chasing Those Dreams With You”, probably take my limited voice as far as it can go. I embellished the track with lots of vocal loops from Logic to try and mask my deficiencies as a singer. I piled layers and layers of effects on my voice – autotuning, reverb, adaptive limiters, and so on. But, at the end of the day it is me warbling away. Because, at the the end of the day, this project was all about trying to reconnect with my teenage self, and that acne scarred romantic fool was who I was at the time…
The artwork in the music video was created by my brother-in-law Sam Angoori. Sam retired a few years after I did, and his been a shining inspiration to me on how to use your abundance of unscheduled time as a retiree to focus on your art. He has over the years become a very dedicated painter, and continually hones and improves his craft. He and I have been on a number of trips together where he paints and I do photography and video, and we are as happy as clams. This song makes a number of references to the ocean and its shores, and so I cherry picked some of my favorite works by him featuring water and shorelines, and included in the video. To see more of his impressive body of work, go to samanoogi.com
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