You know the old saw about the mechanic driving the smoke-belching, beat up, barely running car… As a database guy in real life, you’d think I’d be more on top of my own IT…

But until recently I’d been using a highly informal matrix of data queries, guesswork, and eyeballing to figure out which of my ~150 songs was most due for a new, improved version — or at least a shot at one — here in AYoS.

But I finally broke down and used some of the handy dandy aggregate query functions that Bill Gates kindly hammered into my local DB manager, Access, and set up a kind of one-stop for quickly spotting songs that had only been done once or twice and/or which had never had a version score high in my idiosyncratic personal rating system (which is currently hidden from your sight, thank you very much).

Even though this song, “Without Warning Blues” goes back at least a few decades, a reasonable performance had so far escaped me. This one just barely clears my rather low bar.

Without Warning 

You came without warning
on a monday morning
the day was all shot through
by shadows from the past
afterimages of the last
time that I was with you

and it didn’t take nothing
to see that I was something
that you just had to do
Well it mighta been right
on a Monday night
to release a little energy with you
— it mighta been right
in the end it came down to you

And I didn’t mean maybe
when I put it to you baby
There’s just time space and nothing more
But instead of pain
we could have pleasure again
just like before you heard about the fall

so when you come come
come come come around me
please take some form
take some from I can see
Well ghosts are fine
but I like some flesh on mine
Ya can’t steal my love
Ya can’t have my love for free

Copyright 1974
T.K. Major

(C)2008, TK Major