专辑简介

These of three of the more autobiographical songs I've written.

My Prayer was born on a summer day in August 2006, not long after my first wife moved out of the house we were renting. The house happened to be situated on a "country" road that bordered the grounds of a school district. Though you couldn't technically see the athletic fields, school buildings and playgrounds, you could hear distant noises from them. One day, sitting with all the windows open to let the summer breeze in, I was feeling about as down as I've ever felt about my life: I knew I had really blown it. I had a great wife, great life, great band: burgeoning music career - we were working hard and going places: even got auditions in the big houses in Nashville. The marriage was ending due to my foolishness and I was feeling every bit of it. While sitting there blankly looking at a wall and just trying to get through another day of pain, I happened to hear the sound of children laughing - the sound coming from the distant playground at the schools. I couldn't see the children, but I heard them laughing. It was an interesting thing to hear while I was sitting all alone in that house feeling like I wanted to just die and get it over with. So I took out a pad and wrote: "Children laughing in the distance - wish I could be more like them." Simple sentiment. Nothing terribly deep or original about it. But it begged to be linked to other thoughts and I just kept writing. Before I knew it: I had the song pretty much finished and worked on it with the guitar. It was meant to be a calling out to a Creator that I'd been trying to "bargain" with to undue the trouble I had caused my own life. It was a series of reflections on my life with my first wife, and how much better it could have been if I had been the man I promised to be at the altar. It was painful to write, and at least for the first couple of times I sang it publicly, painful to perform. It helped me clarify some of my thoughts and move ahead with life.

The Sound of a Dream was actually written quite awhile ago: I've always thought of it as the song singing back to the songwriter. The song is acknowledging its life, its presence, to the person who wrote it down. People write songs for a lot of different reasons. I've done all of that - including writing songs with the real hope that someday a lot of people would want to buy it and make me rich and famous. In that context, a song is a dream that a songwriter has: and this song describes what that dream "sounds" like being sung.

It Stopped Raining uses the oft-employed bad weather metaphors to describe troubles in our lives. It was written around the same time as My Prayer, as I was experiencing a keen sense of emotional rawness and was allowing myself to put into song all these disorganized thoughts I was battling. Tough to be at war with your own thoughts. One of the foolish things I did as my marriage was ending was to take up a "relationship" with this girl - and (big surprise) we were fighting a LOT. I wrote this song about this unrealistic notion that I could look to her to save me from what I'd done to my marriage, my musical aspirations, and my life in general. She was anything BUT the answer I needed, but I did get a decent song out of it.