Here’s something a little different than the other songs I’ve written lately. Not so much in the singing or playing, but the way I wrote the song and what goes into it and comes out of it.

Most of the tunes I’ve written the past month or two have been, maybe, what you’d call love songs, or Gospel tunes, or, at least, songs that are fairly personal, or could be seen that way.

This one, though, ain’t like that. I was having some trouble last night (and last week) coming up with a song to write. Mainly because I was getting tired of writing personal tunes. So I was flipping back through my notebook to see if anything caught my eye and I found a page I’d marked back on February 22. Here’s what I wrote:

I don’t wanna be in London town
or go over the deep blue sea
every gypsy camp has been burned out
by a 600 foot fire hose

and also this in a sort of random place:

just with you

I think I remember writing this in the car, driving into my day job early in the morning. Musta had some great, grand idea for a new song and then let it drop once I was stationary.

So, anyway, I found that and remembered I was thinking of writing a song just with images from all the old tunes that I sing around the house. Gypsies, calamities, two-timers, gamblers, jokers, cigarette smokers. All that stuff. So for this new song I used that as my baseline and went from there.

Can you tell what songs I pulled from? Here’s a minute to guess….

And here’s the answers:

The first verse contains images from Handsome Molly and Black Jack David. Those two songs I’ve been playing forever. Used to play em out a ton before I was writing for myself. The next verse is straight up based off the song I Buyed Me a Little Dog. It’s a weird one that Dave Van Ronk put on an album. A great little fantastical song.

The third verse’s images come from the tune Acres of Clams. I sing this one a lot. Usually A cappella. Never out at a show, though. This one’s just for me. Learned it off an old Ramblin’ Jack Elliott album.

And the last verse is kinda a combination of Woody Guthrie’s New York Town and the Carter Family’s The Cannonball. But it’s really fast and loose with those two songs so you gotta listen close.

Anyway, that’s where this tune came from.

Where’d the title come from, and how does it relate at all to the song? Well, I don’t know. It was just already written at the top of the page that I wrote this song on and I couldn’t think of another, better title, so I just went with Mismanaged.

Hope ya enjoy.

I wrote this new one last night. I hate doing that. Getting up to the last minute of my deadline and squeezing one out. Hardly ever turns out the way I want. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just falls flat. I think this one just falls flat.

Oh well.

I had a couple other tunes I was working on throughout the week, but they just weren’t going anywhere, so I dropped em by the wayside. Those type of things I just stick in a pile of unfinished business and maybe come back to it later. There’ve been a handful of songs I’ve brought back outta that pile over the last year or so, but mostly I use it to lift lines or ideas from and take them in a different direction altogether.

So that’s that for today. I still haven’t really figured out what to do in place of Replay Thursdays since I don’t have any tunes from last year to re-record (until the week of April 25). Maybe this week I’ll give that some time.

See ya.

Here’s a new tune I started writing way back on February 27. The first verse was all I jotted down and I let it sit until Friday last week, when I picked up again.

I didn’t really have any issues with the music. It’s just a straight up blues progression. One I’ve used a million times in a million other songs. Works here, fairly well, I think.

The singing fell in line easy too and after I got the first verse set to music and the way I wanted to sing it the other verses just stacked right up. I finished off the last verse last night and then lad down the cut.

It’s a decent attempt at a song, I think. There’s something in there to work on. With these type of blues tunes I sometimes feel like there’s a chorus missing or something that needs to change in the song structure to loosen it up a bit. So it’s not feeling so similar and repetitive throughout. Maybe someone else can come up with that part for me.

Maybe you?