Category Archives: acoustic

A Moody Guy

There ain't no heart in my heart anymore...

OK… I guess it’s no surprise a lot of us theoretically creative types have… oh, let’s call them… mood issues.

Of course, we don’t all go the Elliott Smith route and there are, undoubtedly, some happy-go-lucky types who keep pouring out music and words (or other forms of art) and never once think about plunging a dagger into our own hearts.

Well… there must be.

But it ain’t me.

We all have ups and downs, of course. And, perhaps, it stands to reason that those who “live large” will have higher highs and lower lows. Not to mention more erratic cycles of up and down, longer, shorter… maybe a little like heart arrhythmia, I suppose: too fast, too slow, pounding, barely beating… that’s what the emotional life of some of us is like.

A life of interesting times, you might say.

Anyhow, I’m not bitching. Good grist for the kind of songs I write. (Or do I write the kind of songs I write because of… yeah, you think?)

But it’s been a long and rocky journey, too. And, as those adept at reading between the lines have probably already sussed, after a few decades of alternating — and, not unoften, overlapping — periods of attempted monogamy and semi-wanton carousing, all of it well-lubricated by society’s drug-of-choice, alcohol, I have in recent years led, by comparison, an almost monastic life of relative seclusion and sobriety.

That might sound like something healthy and mature — and, to be certain, I have, thank God, no desire to try to squeeze back inside the bottle that contained me for so many years. But alcohol did, for me, have a leveling effect on my moods. It sort of mushed them together.

And, honest to God, for me, a good, nasty black out drunk and killer hangover seemed to have the same kind of salubrious effect claimed for electroshock therapy. You wake up, you can’t remember anything, you ache all over… but whatever it is you were obsessively worrying about is pretty well forgotten, just part of the smear of history. Past history.

That was the good part of drinking, for me.

The bad part was that what started out as an occasional blow-out became, over the years, a somewhat more subdued, but nightly, then daily routine. (Well, the two beers every morning before coffee counted for something, yeah? After breakfast, I was good ’til cocktail hour… as long as that began about 5 or 6 pm and lasted until closing.) I had many adventures over the years with a bottle in one or both hands… but at the end I was just watching TV and sluggin back one Bud after another. The guy I swore, when I was 19, that I would never be.

But no good deed ever goes forever unpunished… the receding tides of alcohol revealed a jagged and rocky emotional landscape I’ve found myself picking my way through, ever since.

It’s an interesting life, still.

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previous versions
October 02, 2005
January 27, 2006

There Ain’t No Heart in My Heart No More

There Ain’t No Heart in My Heart Anymore

There ain’t no heart
in my heart no more
I don’t know where it’s gone
but it’s gone for sure
Maybe it went with you
when you went out that door
but there ain’t no heart
in my heart anyore

I feel like giving up and maybe I should
I cant go on and I know it’s no good
There aint no meaning
in life any more
no there aint no heart
in my heart anymore

The end just means
we begin again
where did you say I signed
I’ve lived this life
one two many times
I don’t think I can take it twice

Too many loves
too many lies
too many broken lives

too much night
too little love and way too little love
and nothing to show for a life

There ain’t no heart
in my heart no more
I don’t know where it’s gone
but it’s gone for sure
Maybe it went with you
when you went out that door
but there just ain’t no heart
in my heart no more

7/27/98

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Is this thing still on?

First… a GIG ALERT:

I’ll be joining fellow legends, Tim Swenson (formerly of Lunchbox [the original late 80s LA faves — not the johnny-come-lately 90s band of the same name] , Candida, Drink Deep, and Thieving Kind) and Raindog (aka publisher and poet RD Armstrong in his bluesy, whisky-voiced folky mode) at Long Beach, CA, cultural mecca, Portfolio, this coming Friday,FEBRUARY 23, at 9pm, in an informal roundtable, song-swap format. Portfolio is a charming, comfortable old coffeehouse with great coffee. There’s no cover and all ages are welcome.

Uh… remember me?

I didn’t think so.

I’m the guy who used to write this blog, here. I had podcasts and silly little vignettes purportedly designed to illustrate or augment the mostly acoustic versions of my songs I’d been posting since Fall Equinox 2005…

I know, I know… it’s pretty hazy to me, too.

Of course, it’s really only been a few weeks since I posted any new music… but in that time I’ve lost my voice, forgotten how to play (just in time for the live show mentioned above), had my songwriter’s block turn into blogger’s block and, not necessarily unrelatedly, had to move the written content part of this blog from one server to another. (Forget that happy face talk in the post below… the aftermath of the move was, as they say on the internet, a royal PITA.)

But I’m back, damn it, and, if not proud, at least unbowed.

Here’s a little (and I mean little) improvised instrumental guitar duet (featuring that great duo me & I) just to get things rolling again…

A Rainy Presidents Day

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Two fools for the price of one…

Two Fools

Fool.

Terminator menu system-like, I see a short list of possible angles and ledes…

1) Since the beginning of time, the fool has symbolized man’s ambivalence about the relationship between knowledge, wisdom, and grace…

2) The idiot. The savant. Are they not two sides of the same illusory coin of enlightenment…?

3) In the medieval courts, who better than the sovereign’s own chosen fool to plumb the inner machinations of that court or even to orchestrate those intrigues…

I dunno.

Here are two songs that both have the word fool in the title.

The first is something of an oldie, going back to the early 80s but here rearranged somewhat, different chords, a slightly darker feel.

The second is, even by the rough standards of AYoS, pretty sloppy. Intentionally sloppy — but that’s like intentionally ugly in a painting: you have to be an artist to make it work. Here, we just have sloppiness. Still, there’s a cheery, who gives a good goshdarn exuberance to it that matches the relatively optimistic lyrics.

Relatively optimistic, that is, for this writer. I still manage to get in a line about falling down the well of one’s own soul, bottomless, hell, yadda yadda. So, anyhow…

4) None of the above.

No Fool

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previous versions
9 November 2005
19 February 2006

No Fool

Sitting all alone
by my telephone
Waited all day
but that’s okay
I could wait all night
and that would be all right
for a woman like you
I would wait all my life

Sometimes I pull myself together
and I go downtown
I’m all dressed up
and I wander around
and I feel like a fool
I can’t stop thinking of you
When you’re all alone
this city’s so cruel

I walk along the river
until the stars come out
I sit by myself alone in the dark
and I wonder
Oh yes I wonder
I’m just like a child
but I am no fool
I know it’s over

(C)1980, TK Major

I Should Stop Being Such a Fool

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previous AYoS version
Friday, October 13, 2006

I Should Stop Being Such a Fool

I told my self
Life has no meaning
I told myself
I should stop dreaming
I told myself
I should stop being such a fool

I told myself
love’s just a lie
I told myself
I should get wise
I told myself
being kind is just being cruel

Lookin in my heart
was like lookin’ in a well
and if there was a bottom
you couldn’t really tell
as dark as midnight
all the way down to hell
one day I looked in
and then I just fell

Then I looked in my soul
and I saw that it was empty
and I said to myself
just like the rest of them
and i said out loud
from here on
it’s all ’bout number one

But I added that up
and I factored in forever
I subtracted my dreams then
divided that by never
When I saw the bottom line
I sat down — I knew that
I was done

Lookin in my heart…

Back then I told my self
Life has no meaning
And I told myself
I should stop dreaming
Then I told myself
I should stop being such a fool

But then I thought to myself
what’s it all for?
and I thought to myself
must be something more
and I realized all at once
there’s more than one kind of fool

(C) 2006, TK Major

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I’ll be loving you until I’m put in my grave…

A diamond ring in the gutter

A sense of betrayal hung over America when this song was written. It was so heavy you could taste the bitterness in your mouth.

That feeling seeped into seemingly every aspect of our lives, from religion to family, to romance, like a corrosive leak, slowing eating its way through the infrastructure of our lives.

I wrote about that in the political sense when I posted this song before but I neglected to explore the broader implications of that acidic doubt and distrust… how it ate into not just societal institutions like government, schools, jobs, church, but right into the family and and the most intimate relationships between people.

Everything we knew was wrong.

That’s how it looked, most days.

But when I wrote this song — one of my very first — I wanted to craft a simple expression of faith in love in the face of doubt and fear… or get laid. I can’t remember which. Probably the latter.

But it’s a nice little song, anyhow, I think.

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Internet Archive page for this recording

previous AYoS versions
Thursday, Oct 27, 2005
Sunday, March 19, 2006

What Promises Mean Today

I know what promises mean today
I don’t care I believe in you anyway
I don’t care what anyone says
I’ll believe in you until I’m dead
But at the rate things are going
That could be any day
I don’t care
I believe in you anyway

You say you’re my lover
my sister my brother my friend
I’m surprised you don’t claim
to be my mother my father
and the priest that the church said they’d send at the end

And I still don’t care what anyone says
I’ll be loving you until I’m put in my grave
but at the rate things are going
that could be any day
I don’t care I believe in you anyway

I know what promises mean today
I don’t care I believe in you anyway

(C)1974, TK Major

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