Words & Music

impossible songs v Willie Mason

impossible songs

Thank you Willie Mason, Rufus etc.

I’m not sure at all where songs come from, how they get into your head or how the process works. Often I’ll think of something or get an idea and the timing is just bad; at a meeting, driving, or first thing in the morning when I’m not quite awake or worst of all just as I’m about to fall asleep. The ideas born at these times tend to have a very short life span and quickly die unless some higher part of my conscious mind kicks in and intervenes. You wouldn’t think it’d take much but just stopping or changing step to write a phrase or idea down seems to take a huge amount of effort, which for some reason I tend to resist.

Any way for no reason at all an idea came to me last night while I was driving and listening to a Rufus Wainwright song on the radio. The song was “The art teacher” and strangely it has no connection I can see with the lyric I wrote. Also playing in my head was that gorgeous garage band shuffle drum sound that Willie Mason gets on all his songs. I was driving, hearing that and Willie’s lyric “Signed myself out today” while Rufus crooned the art teacher thing. So out came...


(Verse 1)

All the things they say about me are true,
The words they throw, they think, just stick like super glue,
And it seems I’m something that you’d pick up on your shoe,
For all the things they say about me are true.

(Verse 2)

All the tales they tell about me are bona fide and accurate,
Every syllable, vowel and constonant is immaculate,
They write, they taunt, they think, then they regurgitate,
Yes all the tales they tell about me are so accurate.

(Verse 3)

All the gossip that you hear about me is factual,
It’s based on truth, it’s dirty proof, it’s truly actual,
That torrid talk’s not perjury or evidence circumstantial,
Yes all the gossip that you hear about me is factual.

(Chorus or middle eight or other messy bit)

All the things that they say about me are true,
But it just flies off, for god has made me bullet proof
I’m like some superman just standing on your roof,
You point and shoot and I don’t squeal or make a move,
I’ll take your best shot and I’ll let you follow through,
I’m a human target and a bull’s eye just for you,
I don’t make this up or glam it up, it just reflects the stuff I do,
For all the things they say about be must be true.

I may need to edit this a bit more to scan it and to make it singable in some way and I have not applied any guitar paste to this audio wall paper. Will it fly or will it drown? Will it join a few others in a one-way Word folder optimistically titled “songs”? Whatever it has survived the first difficult stage, it made it into my waking mind and onto this page.