I'm not a performer, a singer, a musician, an arranger, a producer.  I'm just not.  I do what I can but I dream about what it might be like to work with someone who could do all the things I can't do, which is most of it.  Wouldn't it be great to have a collaborator?

================================

Collaborator was re-mixed and re-mastered May 2023.

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Verse 1:
Last night I had a dream
I dreamt about a beautiful song
The words were deeply moving
And the melody was strong
I got up right away
I picked up my guitar
I tried to compose my dream
But I didn't get very far

Verse 2:
The notes I played were nothing like
The melody in my dream
And the words came out as doggerel
If you know what I mean
This sort of thing happens all the time
When I get a song in my head
I tried to write that song for a while
Then I got back into bed

Chorus:
I need a collaborator
To help me do what I want to do
Someone to help fill in the puzzle
Make one and one equal more than two
I need a collaborator if I'm ever going to be great
And once I find a collaborator we can collaborate

Verse 3:
I'm not too proud to tell you I'm
Not the world's most talented guy
I guess that's just the way it is
No point in asking why
But maybe with the right kind of help
I could do more with the talent I've got
The right sort of partnership
Could take me straight to the top

Chorus:
I need a collaborator
To help me do what I want to do
Someone to help fill in the puzzle
Make one and one equal more than two
I need a collaborator if I'm ever going to be great
And once I find a collaborator we can collaborate

Bridge:
I can do a lot of things
But I can't do it all
If I found me a number
I just might make a call
Maybe there's somebody out there
Who could fill in the missing bit
and if they're looking for someone
We just might be a perfect fit

Verse 4:
My whole life my tendency has been
to do everything on my own
That's meant there's a whole lot of things
that somehow never get done
No one really makes it alone
They get a little help on the way
Maybe if I find a collaborator
Everything will work out Ok

Chorus:
I need a collaborator
To help me do what I want to do
Someone to help fill in the puzzle
Make one and one equal more than two
I need a collaborator if I'm ever going to be great
And once I find a collaborator we can collaborate

Collaborator

Video of Freely Flowing at  https://youtu.be/5oPGkFsEh-Y?si=mSd1AKwPB6Xst81g
*******
This is the song referenced in "Blue Book", the story song that's also available on this site.  I found the lyrics in a fifty year old travel journal.  I tried to find Patrick Dietsch, the composer of the original song, but I was too late.  He died in May 2021.

When I found the lyrics my memory of the tune sort of came back. I was pretty sure about how the first line went and the first two or three chords, but I was unable to remember the rest of the song.  So I decided to write a melody and chord progression that reflected the original song as best as I could recall.  I really don't know how much of the song was written by Patrick Dietsch and how much was written by me.  The lyrics are all mine.

This became my song because I spent 15 minutes of scribbling on December 31, 1972.  I'd love for it to exist for a few more years with just a smidgen less obscurity.  

You can look up Patrick Dietsch on Google France.  He wasn't a superstar but he was a successful and respected musician with a long career.

====================

Verse 1:
Sunlight shining softly in the summertime
Feeling all the feelings flowing through my mind

Verse 2:
Have you heard the words that make you feel so free.
And have you got the time to spend some time with me.


Chorus:
Freely flowing
Sing a song of the river moving on
Freely flowing
Wait a while and watch the river rushing right along
The river seems to know - you’re right where you belong

Verse 3:
You know now baby pretty soon your gunna see
The same river flowing through you is flowing through me

Verse 4:
I want to know you cuz you see we have to care
We gotta lotta love and we can learn to share.

Chorus:
Freely flowing
Sing a song of the river moving on
Freely flowing
Wait a while and watch the river rushing right along
The river seems to know - you’re right where you belong

Verse 5:
Sing your songs now baby sing your soul to me
Let’s sit beside the river cuz it flows so free
credits

Freely Flowing

•See the Video•

Video on YouTube at https://youtu.be/A5E2yobmFEM.

I'm an American but I've lived in Australia for nearly 50 years.  That didn't save me from being shocked and upset by what happened in the 2016 election.  And now it's happened again again.  This song is a message to the USA.  I thought I'd broken up with her, but then this.
Trump caricature by DonkeyHotey at https://flickr.com/photos/47422005@N04/5471912349


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November was re-mixed and re-mastered May 2023.

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Verse
So far away and a long time ago
I was sure I'd left you behind
Life had moved on in that way that you know
Life is moving on on all the time
I wasn't prepared for the changes that struck
On that sunny November day
I'd known you were hurting and down on your luck
But I still thought you'd be ok.

Chorus
I think I've lost you again
As you drift ever further away
I'm shocked by the depth of the pain
I felt on that November day 

Verse
I thought I'd finally moved on
The past was simply the past
The life I had then was all gone
But today life is moving so fast
I felt certain that I was quite free
You were hardly a part of my life
But the news was so shocking to me
It cut with the heat of a knife

Chorus
I guess I've lost you again
As you drift ever further away
I'm shocked by the depth of the pain
I felt on that November day. 

Bridge
That early November no one could foresee it
I watched as you stumbled and couldn't believe it
You gave all you had for something much stranger
You must have known something but ignored the danger

Verse
I always knew you had madness inside
But somehow you kept it in check
So it pains me to say that I cried and I cried
As I watched you lose all self respect
I fear for the people who live with you still
How can they know what to do
If it's this hard for me I just can't conceive
What they must be going through

Chorus
Now that I've lost you again
And you drift ever further away
I'm shocked by the depth of the pain
I felt on that November day

November Day

Too Many Words was included in the top 30 list for the CONTEMPORARY POP DANCE Category of the 2022 Australian Songwriting Contest. 

I was thinking one day about how my songs are wordy.  I had the thought that I could write one that was mostly the words "too many words" and would have far fewer words than most.  Naturally irony prevailed and "Too Many Words" probably has too many words.

=========================

Chorus 1:
Too many words
Get in the way
Of all the clever things
I was planning to say
Too many words
Over the top
I know what I'm doing
But I can't seem to stop

Verse 1:
I've been nervous thinking
About what I'd say tonight
I rehearsed a whole lot cuz
I wanted to get it right
I was looking here and there
Through all the words I knew
To find the words to tell you
How I feel about you

Chorus 2:
Too many words
Got in the way
Of whatever it was I thought
That I wanted say
The most important things
Are hard to convey
That's when too many words
Get in the way

Bridge:
Long as I remember it's always been this way
No matter what I talk about I've got too much to say
All my songs are far too long
All my stories are long too
I rarely choose a single word when 5 or 10 will do.

Verse 2:
I stumbled over adjectives
Adverbs, nouns and verbs
All I heard myself say
was a jumbled mess of words
Felt i should Apologise
For what I'd put you through
Before I could you smiled and said
You already knew

Chorus 3:
I wasn't sure
What it was I heard
I was still caught up in my
Avalanche of words
I felt so alive like I could
Laugh and dance and sing
But I couldn't manage
to say a single thing

Chorus 4:
You taught me a lot
‘bout talking since that day
I’ve learned that what you hear
Matters more than what I say
I still got a ways to go
Before I master brevity
But I’m getting better at telling you
what you mean to me
I took some time and thought about
All the words I could do without
One by one I cut them out
'Til the only words left numbered three

Too Many Words

Best That I Knew How was included in the shortlist for the ROCK/INDIE category of the 2022 Australian Songwriting Contest. 

================================

Best That I Knew How was re-mixed and re-mastered June 2023.

===============================

Verse 1:
We started talking about nothing at all
We shared a bit of something and I started to fall
A little bit in love I guess I answered a call
Made her more than a friend

So we got married in a rush of youth
Feeling so free, playing fast and loose
I always meant well you know that's the truth
But I stuffed it up in the end

Chorus:
Wish I could say that I did my best
But it's simply not true
I could have done a whole lot better
If I'd known what to do
I did as much as who I was at the time would allow
I'd like to think that whatever I did, I did the best that I knew how

Verse 2:
We brought you home your mum and me
You entered our house turned two into three
So I went to work thought my job was to be
Bringing home big buckets of security

Who knew back then what a father should be
Who knew what a little boy or girl might need
I learned too late what I needed to see
More than anything you needed more of me.

Chorus:
Wish I could say that I did my best
But it's simply not true
I could have done a whole lot better
If I'd known what to do
I did as much as who I was at the time would allow
I'd like to think that whatever I did, I did the best that I knew how

Bridge:
That's not to say that I didn't try
That's all I ever did and that's no lie
If I didn't live up to the standards I had
I never thought that I was doing all that bad
The only life I've known has been in my own skin
I've never been the man I wish I'd been

Chorus:
Wish I could say that I did my best
But it's simply not true
I could have done a whole lot better
If I'd known what to do
I did as much as who I was at the time would allow
I'd like to think that whatever I did, I did the best that I knew how

================================

This is another take on the song previously released as The Best. The Best was reworked as a ballad and worked well.  This version is my attempt to reproduce the sort of song that I was thinking of when I wrote it.

Best That I Knew How

This song is simply a story, all of it true.

It's about a another song called "Freely Flowing". The original music for "Freely Flowing" was written by Patrick Dietsch, a French guitarist I met at the end of 1972 somewhere in Mexico. He was travelling with another guitarist and they would pick up some travelling money by playing at whatever venues they could find. I only knew him for a week or two. The last time I saw him he was performing at a bar on December 31, 1972. I presented him with some lyrics I'd written that day for an instrumental he'd composed. And that was that. I played that song for a few years until my guitar playing stopped being a big part of my life and forgot about it.

When I uncovered the song buried in my Blue Book it had his name and address on the same page as the lyrics. In the Google era tracking people down isn't what it used to be. I quickly discovered that he had been been a bit of a rock and roll star in France and that his career lasted until the early 2000s. I sent him a message but didn't get a reply. The next time I looked I found his obituary. He died of Alzheimer's in May last year.

I was still left with the song. I could remember how it began and the first two or three chords but that was it. With Patrick gone there'd be no one who could tell me how it went. So I had to make it up. The recomposed "Freely Flowing" is available on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and various other platforms.

Verse 1:
Patrick played guitar in a Mexican bar back in 1972
We hung around together, made some music for a week or two
That Frenchman wrote a song
I wrote some lyrics then went traveling on
Wrote it down it in my Blue Book like I’d sometimes do

I added "Freely Flowing" to the list of songs in my repetoire
Back in those days I was playing quite a lot
But time plays games I guess
Over time I was playing less and less
Until I couldn’t even recall what it was that I'd forgot

Chorus:
A blue book from my younger years
Full of hope and dreams and all my personal fears
There's no music but the words still last
Becoming part of today from the deep past

Verse 2:
Going through old stuff I happened on my blue book
Full with memories of at least some of those days
There was that song
And than a little bit later on
His name and address were sitting right there on the page

Thought these days it might be possible to find Patrick
Can’t know what you can do unless you take a chance
But I'll admit surprise
When the story that hit my eyes
Was about a rock and roll star in France

Chorus:
A blue book from my younger years
Full of hope and dreams and all my personal fears
There's no music but the words still last
Becomming part of today from the deep past

Verse 3:
He was a faded star cuz just like me he was old now
I figured i'd send him a message and wait and see
I'd found my words
But I had lost his tune
Who knows, maybe he might remember me

Sad to say there really isn’t a happy ending
By the time I finally looked he had drifted so very far
Why your memory goes
I guess that nobody know
In May of 21 he finally put down his last guitar

Chorus:
A blue book from my younger years
Full of hope and dreams and all my personal fears
There's no music but the words still last
Becomming part of today from the deep past

Blue Book

Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/track/6aAy1nWjAQJKKOgj0AgoeN?si=0e14a9e14a4f44b1
YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/58LVNbbwgWA
=========================================
Mad Hatter was remixed and remastered on 11 January 2025
=========================================
In 1972 I was heading towards South America via Mexico and other parts of Central America. I knew that certain hairstyles were frowned upon at various borders. Rather than doing anything drastic, like cutting my hair, I purchase a $15 dollar short hair wig and wore it for my passport photo. 

That wig hat served me well across a number of borders.

I actually wrote the song before I ever crossed one of those borders. At least I think so. I know I wrote it while I was travelling on my own somewhere between the US border and Silvia, Columbia. I had plenty of time in cheap hotel rooms along the way.

I like to think that this song says something about the experience of being a traveller on the road to who knows where. I'm not sure what that might be, but it feels very familiar. It takes me back.

Verse 1:
Looking for hat that comes from south of the border
He needs very big one so it must be made to order
All we really know is that he's from a northern nation
Where he took off his sombrero and he left it in the station

Chorus:
But it’s all right
It doesn’t matter
Been a long night
For the mad hatter

Verse 2:
Morning takes his head and hides it in the corner
But that can’t conceal the fact that he’s been heading for the border
So he takes a couple pills just to prove he’s not a purist
Puts a wig hat on his head so he looks just like a tourist

Chorus:
But it’s all right
It doesn’t matter
Been a long night
For the mad hatter

Verse 3:
Paradise is just a place he touches on the run
The loving and the living give him strength for moving on
The world’s out there waiting but it always strikes him funny
When he ends up in some hell hole and he’s just run out of money

Chorus:
But it’s all right
It doesn’t matter
Been a long night
For the mad hatter


Verse 4:
Can’t tell you bout his future, can’t tell you bout his past
Sometimes he says he’s happy and hopes that it’ll last
More often in the night in his hotel all alone
He wonders what he’s doing why he hasn’t got a home

Chorus:
But it’s all right
It doesn’t matter
Been a long night
For the mad hatter

Mad Hatter

See Video

Eve and I were travelling in the Northern Territory a while back when the line "I'm not a love song kind of guy" came to me. I thought it was such an obvious title for a country song that there must be a few songs like it around. As best I could I searched for and failed to find those songs. I figured that the song needed to exist so I thought I'd better write it. This is what I came up with.

Verse 1
I started writing songs some time ago
Don't know why I guess that I just decided to give it a go
I would write about this or that anything i could
I didn't know and hardly cared if it was any good
But I never touched the theme of love, I really don't know why
It occurred to me I might not be a love song kind of guy

Verse 2
At first that didn't bother me, I had a lot to say
Just me and this old guitar, I was still learning to play
But as I learned to weave my words between and around a tune
I'd try my hand at a song of love but it always seemed too soon
Over time it became a missing piece - something I could not deny
By and by I decided I'm not a love song kind of guy


Bridge
I'm inclined to write a line to make you think or smile
Or find something in my words that'll make my song worthwhile
But when it comes to you and me all my words run dry
I guess I'm not a love song kind of guy

Verse 3
It all changed a while ago when everything turned real
Now it's important to me to express the way I feel
But I don't know how to say that your smile lights up my day
Or how much love I feel for you but don't have the words to say
I can't make the words work no matter how I try
I have to face that it's not my place to be a love song kind of guy

Love Song Kind of Guy

Love Song Kind Of Guy

I never really knew Leone but I met her around 40 years ago.  This is her song.

She shared her name with her car
Funny what memories do
Except for the end of her tale
Her name and her car were all that I knew

I really didn’t know her at all
But even now I remember her name
The thing thing that made her easy to recall
Her name and her car’s were exactly the same

Leone was a friend of my first wife
After we split up I didn’t see her any more
A Subaru Leone - was the car that she drove
They stopped making those cars in 1994

Not going to tell you the story
It’s really not my story to tell
It was all over the news 
If you’re old enough you’ll remember it well

She was lost like so many
Alone in the world all on her own
Of all the people there on that day
Leone was the only one that I’d ever known

Tragedies happen all of the time
Somewhere in the world every day
We've all felt the ripples in time
No matter how far away.

Big stories and small
All those beginnings and ends
Leone's story is a sad story
Mostly remembered by her family and friends

She shared her name with her car
Funny what memories do
Except for the end of her tale
Her name and her car were all that I knew

Leone

The Mystery of Atlantis
Since long long ago, people have been fascinated by the mystery surrounding the island of Atlantis. The myth says that this beautiful island and all its inhabitants disappeared completely into the sea within 24 hours. Atlantis was first named and described by the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 BC). According to Plato, Atlantis was situated in front of the 'Pillars of Hercules' (now known as the Straight of Gibraltar) in the Atlantic region, in around 9600 BC.
https://www.molenaar.com/details/1/19753/en

The Mystery Of Atlantis - Michael Geisler

Molenaar Edition is a publisher of sheet music for Concert Band, Fanfare and Brass Band. Molenaar Edition also has its own CD label, MBCD, that releases 3 to 4 CDs , a year.

The company was founded in 1933 by Pieter Jan Molenaar under the name Molenaar’s Muziekhandel. In the 1970s, his sons Jan and Bob joined the growing company. The name was changed to Molenaar’s Muziekcentrale, and later to Molenaar Edition BV.

I write songs.  I'm not a performer any more than I need to be to have my songs heard once in a while. I hope that better musicians than I encounter my songs and decide to play them.  I just write songs to have them exist in the world. If the world likes them then the world can do with them what it will.  All these recordings are demos.  I've tried to make them as musically interesting as I can but they are all awaiting the skilled hand of someone who knows how to make songs shine.

New tracks tagged #OriginalCompostion