Saturday Song Stories - "Like Your Love"

As any songwriter will tell you, there is no one way to write a song. Some come easily and others are hard work. Like Your Love, the second song on the album that talks about God's love and how it remains the same in a world that is in a constant state of change, is one of those songs that needed time to marinate...sort of like a $1.99 fast fry steak. Here's what I mean.

In early 2006, I wrote the first line, "The Sunset sets the city ablaze in a sultry yellow-orange haze", while walking in Deer Lake NL. I think it was late spring, and the setting sun was bright and orange and it seemed to be setting the whole town on fire. This line came to me, but nothing else. I wrote it down and let it marinate.

Around the same time, I had also written a song called Tired of Gone about a man whose love had left him. The song was over the top in terms of how sad it was. It contained lines like "Now their house is a park where mommas play with their babies in the noonday." The song ends with a poor old man sitting in a coffee shop dreaming about being in love with every girl that walks in. I actually performed it once in concert and apologized for how mournful it was. That song got put away to marinate.

Then, in early 2008, the night before I was to go into the studio with my contributions to the "Hope In The Midst of a Storm" Project, I looked through my notebooks. I came across these bits and pieces and they all seemed to fit together, as if they had finished marinating and were now ready to be grilled. All of these pieces - the sunset line, the bridge part from "Tired of Gone" (Seen a million faces pass me by...) a jazz inspired chord progression- all came together to make my fast fry steak into a piece of meat that doesn't taste half bad.

The moral of this story: You don't always need to rush your creative ideas. Don't force it. Ideas often need time to marinate.