I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had only one song in the can and that it had been there for months.  This is the one.  I’d forgotten how strange the vocal sounds on it.  I had a cold or allergy that caused a tickle in the throat, and I remember that the challenge was to get through it without coughing.

The fact that I’d done three old songs in a row, old by nutcracker standards anyway, means that I’ve been lazy for the last several weeks in that I’ve written nothing new since the buffalo song.  I may be done writing songs generally, though I do need to come up with something next week.  It might turn out to be a cover, even at this late juncture.  We’ll see.

Alphabet Failure.  Using this song also means that I have failed in my quest for alphabetical domination.  I was working on a U song this week, but it just didn’t get done.  I’m not going to do the K song I have.  But Janet is from the UK, and Kellie (see below) went to the University of Kansas, so it all works out.

My Friend’s Wife.  This one’s about a year old.  I wrote it on the way back from Austin last February, the same trip that produced “Dune.”  When I go to Austin I always stay with our friends Clint and Kellie and their daughters Ruby and June (just stayed with them again last week.)  Clint’s one of my best friends from law school; he and Kellie got married in our third year.  I was in Austin for a CLE conference in February, and I left early and headed to their house, which is west of Austin, technically in Dripping Springs.

It was midafternoon on a Wednesday, and I knew Clint wouldn’t be there yet, and since I’ve got kids myself and know how disruptive disruptions can be, I hung back rather than drop in on Kellie and the girls.  Their house is in a woodsy, rustic subdivision, and I parked on the side of one of the roads to wait for Clint and to try to write a song about the red-headed woman whose lunch I’d just bought at the Jim’s in Oak Hill.  I was gearing up to start this project, which first went online a year ago this week.

I got tired of waiting for Clint or got self-conscious about being parked on the side of the road, where everybody driving by was looking at me like I was a pervert, and finally went on to the house. Kellie and the girls were messing around beside the creek, and as I drove up their driveway it occurred to me that I’d known Kellie almost as long as I’d known Clint and that she was as much my friend as Clint is.  It was just one of those things that crosses your mind, not a revelation, because it was always true, or had become true so quietly that it never announced a change of regime.  I’ve known them both about thirteen years, and we’ve shared and compared notes on all the “Crap, Now I Can Be Tried As An Adult” stuff—marriage, career, kids, schools, what we’ll do when we get these student loans paid off (answer:  same thing we were doing before they were paid off), starter houses and second houses.  I can sort of remember Clint without Kellie, but not really.  I remember when he used to make crazy weekend trips all the way up I-35 to Kansas to see her during our first year of law school.

Anyway, though Clint and Kellie are the initial inspiration for the song, the actual story comes from an amalgamation of other stories, other friendships, other marriages, some of which worked out, some of which didn’t.  I tried to pay tribute to Kellie with the Lawrence, Kansas, reference, but she later told me she was actually born in Manhattan, Kansas. She does know a whole lot about bees, though.

Video. That’s Kellie’s and the girls’ handiwork on Clint’s toes.

Wrecks Bell.  Only a few songs on this blog were heard by anybody else prior to being posted to all humankind, and only one–this one–has had what could be called a public airing.  Last spring a friend who performs at open mikes persuaded me that I should do the same. He thought it would be good for me.  He’s an old merchant seaman and thinks things that hurt a lot are good for you.  I’ve always held the opposite view.  But I went to three open mikes with him, the last of which was in Galveston at the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe.  Rex “Wrecks” Bell, the songwriter and raconteur and famous Starbucks opponent immortalized by his best friend Townes Van Zandt in “Wrecks’s Blues,” is the owner and operator of the OQAC.  ”Wrecks will love your stuff!” Dave told me.  This was one of the songs I did.  The song is about a guy who finds that marriage and friendship are mysterious and complicated.  I think it’s quite a sad little song.  Wrecks had the opposite view—he thought the chorus was hilarious.  So I can still crack ‘em up when I do my impression of a guy doing a sad song about a guy whose best friend married a neat gal, at least in Galveston.

Another Kelly.  Accompanying me and Dave on that Galveston trip was our friend Kelly Lancaster, the most talented musician I’ve ever been in the same room with.  I wish I had gotten him to do something on some of these songs—it would have made any of them a thousand times better.  If you’re in Houston, you can hear him Thursday nights at Le Mistral, playing gypsy jazz guitar and mandolin with his violinist partner Vladimir (whose last name escapes me, but the first time I saw Kelly he was playing with Vladimir in the Village at that French place they tore down, and anybody who came into that room while they were playing didn’t leave.  Kelly and I became buddies when it turned out he needed guitar strings and I just happened to have a package with me that evening.)  Kelly is from Nacogdoches and wins pretty much every state and national mandolin or guitar competition he enters. He toured with Willie Nelson a few years ago.  Here he is goofing around on mandolin with friends:

Last Week’s Contest.  Well, there were no winners of the “Who Did Wade Think He Was Ripping Off?” contest last week. Contenders included “The Gambler,” “Garden Party,” “Moonshadow” and my favorite, “I Don’t Want To Live on the Moon,” all of which I may very well have ripped off, but the song I kept thinking I was ripping off, the one “X Marks the Spot” became an exercise in avoiding sounding like, was this one:

Star Wars:  The Missing R2 Unit.  Finally, here’s a movie Thomas and I made Sunday.  I was the cameraman, had a couple of speaking parts, and helped with the technical matters, but he wrote and directed and had final say on the finished product.  My main contribution was the pan backward at the end, which Thomas was very pleased with.