[NOTE: Audio updated 3/30/26 — I equalized the first mix a bit]

I typically do not distribute song posts via E-Mail, but thought I would this time. If my musical self-indulgences are not your cup of tea, you can stop here and please accept my apologies. Garden of Words is a personal journal of sorts, and music is part of what I do.

Still here? Here’s the story:

A song from 1987, updated forty years later. I wrote Empty Wrong and Right in a couple hours on a summer day, around the time of the Iran-Contra hearings. I recorded it the next day in my basement studio, pieces of which are part of the current recording. More on that in a moment. It was an attempt to write something with a rockier edge, without devolving into three chords and a cloud of dust — sort of taking off my Donald Fagen hat and putting on my Pete Townshend hat.

The song portrays a fictional terrorist attack on an American facility, told in part from the perspective of a victim forced to lie on the floor face-down and silently review his or her life. It considers the folly of extremist brainwashing, countered by rote western political rhetoric. Humans talk past each other a lot, and they train their tribes well, without much regard for the consequences. I think we’re now seeing what that looks like when amplified by 24/7 communications, social networks and AI deep fakes — all of which were sci-fi fantasies when I wrote this song. Things were scary enough back then.

This particular recording is a solo effort — 100% me from start to finish. I recently transferred the master multi-track tape of the ancient original recording to digital. After listening to the tracks, I thought that maybe it was worth a fresh look.

The 1987 recording was crude. The bass and drums needed help, but I liked the edge and energy of everything else. Thus, the updated recording is a sneaky brew of old and new sound. The drums and bass are new; the vocals and jangly ‘80’s guitars are from 1987 (except for the end). I considered re-recording the vocals because I used to sing with an affected style that I now find cloying and icky at times. Probably too much Beatles growing up — wait, is that heresy? Forgive me, Sir Paul, forgive me… But there was a certain edge to the performance that is more difficult to muster in these days of age, fatigue and perspective. So in the end, I decided to stick with the original vocals.

The new recording is flawed but vastly improved, and closer to what I imagined forty years ago. It has the punch I sought, certainly. Depending on your sound system, you might hear some thunderous bass frequencies here and there. That’s intentional. I mean, it’s a heavy subject. As Spinal Tap sang… “Heavy! (heavy!) Duty! (duty!) brings out the duty in my soul…” So a “big bottom” was needed. <ahem> Sorry.

I played with the recording off and on over the past few months, experimenting with extra vocals and some additional parts. But, in the end, I prefer it raw. All new material was left on the cutting room floor, other than bass and drums. The one structural change over the original is that I extended the ending. I wanted the song to slowly deconstruct, ending in a drumbeat that dissolves into a mechanical beating heart. Because hearts do get lost in all the rhetoric sometimes, don’t they? Even the ones sculpted by machines.

Lyrics below. Enjoy. And thanks for listening.

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Note: I do not use AI tools with my own music. I create the content using physical and digital instruments and home studio recording methods, using standard hardware and software. I do not aim to sound “current”. I would fail miserably at that. This is more about process than polish. Me being me. Asking an AI system to sanitize the sound would be self-defeating.

Empty Wrong And Right

Face near the ground in the aftermath. Feel the pain and hate of third-world wrath.And the sweat pours freely from my brow.

Automatic shots ring through the air. Human life is gone without a care.And the rhetoric flows from the White House.

You must believe -- should faith redeem your life. The endless sad absurdity of empty wrong and right.

Hours pass, you’re gathered on the floor. Man-child guard from hell stands neat the door. Does he even know what he stands for?

Can he believe his ways must rule despite the endless sad absurdity of empty wrong and right?

[The terrorists respond]

Days pass – a hollow compromise. A look of bored resolve is in their eyes. Fanatical faith complete with corporate lies.

We can’t be free with self-directed sight. The endless sad absurdity of empty wrong and right.

Memories… memories… memories…

Copyright © 1987-2026 Tom Marchione

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I wrote and recorded this song in 2022. You can listen to that version and read about it here if you’re interested. It was a bit of a rush project, and I’ve wanted to re-record and adjust some things for three years. So this is my first attempt at that.

I added a new a cappella intro, replaced the bass part, added some vocal harmonies, and generally tightened things up. The mix still isn’t perfect, but I am out of time for my Christmas deadline. So I thought I would share what I have.

Merry Christmas!

Blue Curtains and Ice is the song that kick-started my college collaboration with Peter Curtiss. And it has been our white whale of sorts in recent years -- this is our fourth attempt to record it in the past three years. More on that in a moment. BC&I started as Peter’s “signature riff” on the piano, which we developed into a song structure in 1982-3. A mutual friend suggested the change to C major in the chorus, which was a great idea (thanks Charlie!).

I eventually added some lyrics -- which remained unfinished for 38 years. Peter’s song title made me think about how much of a show life is most of the time, much of reality being hidden behind thick, elaborate curtains that we sometimes forget are there. And how different life becomes in those brief moments when we let light into our hearts and minds. Those can be challenging or enriching times – we all need to sort that out. That’s what the song is about. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

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Recording History

Our more recent work with the song started in 2018, when Peter created an orchestrated instrumental version. I didn’t have the time to add anything immediately, and Peter’s arrangement stood on its own anyway. But I was feeling the recording itch by the end of the 2020 pandemic year, So I organized a new recording around Peter’s effort, but with my guitar, bass & vocal parts added, and even some live drums from a friend (thanks Owen!).

Those two efforts were a good start, but, truth be told, I was just getting my feet wet with serious digital recording, and it wasn’t quite there yet. In 2023 we decided to start fresh with the song, and return to the original song structure. So we did a couple iterations on that version, and then set it aside again. The version we are releasing now is based on the 2023 effort, but with some new ideas in the arrangement and mix.

For this iteration, we decided to thin things out, dumping the rhythm guitar part entirely. It was too busy and was just getting in the way. Instead, we spiced up the drum part, which is now jazzier and more forward. The guitars now strictly add accents (some faint Allman Brothers influence goin’ on in there…). I also re-recorded the bass part through my Eden bass head, which has exceptional tone. I have no idea why I didn’t use it earlier in these and other sessions. Amazing what equipment you can forget you own… I also added a high vocal harmony accent in the verses, which adds some texture I think.

The result is a recording of this song that, maybe for the first time, I basically like. Oh, I’m sure we will get the itch again at some point and try again. Maybe bring back the live drums? Who knows. But for now, we will need to move on to the next project -- there are still plenty of songs from those days waiting for their first decent recording.

As always, thanks for listening. Enjoy.

Links to Other Songs I’ve Uploaded Here

P.S.: Tech Stuff for Recording Enthusiasts

This version is also a step forward for my mixing skills. I try to learn something new with each project, and this one yielded a couple important lessons. In recent recordings I learned to pay more attention to cleaning up the audio on individual tracks before mixing -- reducing noise, compensating for microphone deficiencies, etc. This time I learned to build on that, adding a dedicated, tailored compressor to most individual channels (as opposed to simply compressing the stereo mix). Professional recording engineers might say “well, duh”, but the art of mixing complicated digital projects is relatively new to me.

Varying frequency and dynamic range characteristics of a track via a truly “musical” sounding compression algorithm works much better that applying equalization (“EQ”) and limiters willy nilly. Applying independent EQs to individual tracks invariably produces harsh and unpleasant overtones in the final mix -- which then begs for even more tinkering and processing in the mastering stage. But strategic, per-track compression using a quality plug-in seems to put all that to bed. I did very little in the mastering stage on this one, other than the basic things that one always does to prepare a mixed recording for release (e.g., editing beginnings and endings, optimizing dynamic range via peak management, etc.). I did no frequency tinkering in the mastering stage, and felt no desire to run the mix through any kind of signal processor to remove “mud”. Best of all, the final master sounded fine across six very different output devices (three sets of headphones and three sets of speakers). That’s generally the mark of a decent mix – or, maybe more accurately, a major indicator of a bad mix is when it sounds “okay” on studio monitors but terrible on cheaper headphones or car speakers. I think I might have finally cracked the case on those mysteries. We’ll see what the next recording brings.

Links to Other Songs I’ve Uploaded Here

The Way I Feel For You is the sixth release of the Bearded Dwarves Reunion sessions, which started in 2022. More info on who we are and why we are doing this can be found here. Short version is Peter Curtiss and I met in college in 1982, developed a musical collaboration and friendship, went our separate ways for a few decades, and are now finally refining and recording our material forty years later.

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I wrote a lot of songs in the summer of 1983, and The Way I Feel For You was one of those. Like a few of those songs, this one ended up on the crude, self-produced album that I recorded in 1985. And like all those recordings, it suffered from “early drum machine-itis” — or, more accurately, my under-developed skills with that new technology. This remake tries to capture the intended energy of the original song, but with an arrangement that a decent high-energy rock or 80’s-era new wave band could reproduce on stage without much of a problem.

This was a weird song for me. I had been influenced by seeing Talking Heads in concert, realizing that they were a different band live, almost a dance band, with constant, driving rhythms that made you want to stand on your seat and boogie. And I think I wanted to write something like that — a new wave-influenced dance song, but with some twists.

I was experimenting a lot with complex jazz chords and dissonances on the guitar in those days. This song was an attempt to synthesize that new wave influence and an obsession with jazz chords. For example, the chord progression for the verses is:

E7+9b5     Eb7+9b5     B7+5    Em  (3X)   C9   D   G13  BbMaj9   Em

And the chords for the middle / breakdown section are:

G13 C#m7b5

If you’ve dabbled in songwriting, you will notice that these aren’t typical chords in rock songs. But, at the time, I enjoyed trying to build songs and melodies around such things …with mixed results of course ;-)

Another twist is the breakdown section in the middle, which I imagine sounds a little derivative to ears in 2024. But, of course, this was 1983. I remember wanting this section to sound almost demented, to reflect the unstable emotions of the song’s protagonist. I enjoyed writing it, but the 1983 version had some rough edges that I never liked and never bothered to correct. So I rewrote it for this version, maintaining the basic idea but refining the lyric. I also added the “this is a test” section for this recording; honestly, that was just a tongue in cheek bit of self-indulgence that I hoped might elicit a few laughs. All in good fun.

In retrospect, the breakdown section in this version kind of reminds me of early material from Beck, although this was written a decade before Beck hit the scene. Of course, Beck has more talent in his pinky finger than I have in total. But it has a similar quirky feel, at least to my ears.

As always, this arrangement features Peter’s keyboards throughout. From the start, we were committed to keeping this version barebones — drums, bass, guitar and piano. But Peter came up with a cool, retro-sounding organ line, and we thought it added something. So we made an exception for that. It’s still a simple arrangement, as I resisted the urge to add horn sections, additional percussion and other orchestration. I don’t think the song needs any of that.

One final interesting note: The female background vocals on this recording are from 1985. I recently digitized the multitrack tape of the 1985 recording of this song. On that recording, I enlisted the help of two other college friends — Kim Carson and Tracy Ferrara — to do background vocals. It turned out that their part was recorded on its own track, which meant that I was able to isolate it. And even though that recording was at a different tempo, and the tuning was slightly off, digital audio technology allowed me to match it up to the current recording.

But it’s even more fun than that. It turned out that Tracy sang the main background lyric by herself on one track, four separate times throughout the song. For the current recording, I was able to edit these four separate performances together, such that the part sounds like a backing vocal group, not just one singer. I was pleased and surprised at how well all of this digital audio processing magic worked — it is so interesting that a performance from 1985 can be adapted and repurposed like this. Pretty cool. I lost touch with Tracy and Kim as that era drew to a close, but will thank them again here for doing that session in my dank and dingy parents’ basement forty years ago.

As always, thanks for listening. Enjoy.

Links to Other Songs I’ve Uploaded Here

Songs Page

1. The Causal Attraction of Two

2. Another Perfect Woman

3. Sojourn Song

4. Sing For Joy (At Christmas)

5. Promise Me (You’ll Be Home For Christmas)

6. The Saga, Part 1: A Groove-y Overture

7. The Way I Feel For You

8. Blue Curtains and Ice

The Saga is a concept piece that Peter Curtiss and I wrote in 1983. It was Peter’s original idea, as he had a number of snippets of piano ideas floating around his 19 year-old brain that all seemed to want to form a coherent whole. So for a few weeks we focused on doing that, adding parts here, subtracting others there. When we were done, the overall form was exactly what you hear in this arrangement. Of course, back then it was arranged for one piano and one guitar, but the structure was exactly the same. When we played out, it would open a two-song set – The Saga followed by Blue Curtains & Ice. I have no idea how we remembered the whole thing, but we could play it without any written music back then. Just Peter with his Yamaha CP-30 and Korg Poly800, and me with my Ibanez Roadstar Strat copy, a FlanJam flanger and an analog delay. The guitar still exists. The analog delay still exists but doesn’t work. The Flanjam died in a basement flood thirty years ago, peace be upon it. Peter’s keyboards have since been supplanted by all sorts of latest technology from Yamaha …although he did recently hunt down a used CP-30 for nostalgia’s sake.

Over the years I have become mildly obsessed with the idea that this is actually an overture to a larger work. Thus the full, latter-day subtitle: “A Groove-y Overture”. I started writing the songs for the larger work a few years ago, but time is at a premium these days, and it’s going to be a long-term kinda project. Now that Peter and I are actively creating music together again, perhaps we can put our heads together. Until then, the overture finally exists in arranged form.

The recording came together off and on over 15 months, beginning in late 2022. Peter kicked things off with a piano track to outline the structure. I then spent a fair amount of time honing tempo changes and adding a reference guitar part. Peter then worked on various piano tracks, and I started working on guitar and bass parts. It was a lot of work, so we set it aside a few times to let ideas simmer as we worked on other songs. By fall, I had accumulated a bunch of arrangement ideas and began working out parts for various sections. We set it aside again late in the year to work on the Christmas song that we released, Promise Me (You’ll Be Home for Christmas). After the new year, we re-focused our attention on this. Peter added the organs; I worked on the orchestration. And, well, it’s finally done.

Peter did the pianos, organs and the violins. I did the guitars, basses, percussion, sound effects, orchestral arrangement and the mix.

Enjoy.

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In 2022, I wrote and recorded my first Christmas song – Sing for Joy (At Christmas). (NB: Here’s the 2025 re-recording of that, which is a cleaner, tighter version). The Sing for Joy project was so much fun that I decided to do another one for 2023 – Promise Me (You’ll Be Home For Christmas).

Sing For Joy is upbeat Christian Contemporary fare, but Promise Me is a Christmas love song — pure “70’s singer/songwriter” ...with maybe a certain additional level of meaning, if you want to find it.

Promise Me is based on a little guitar riff that I fumbled around with in 2010, intending to write (what would then have been) my first Christmas song. Of course, I set it aside and forgot it existed, much like hundreds of other such song ideas that come and go like the back ends of fireflies on an evening in June. Fortunately, over the years I’ve become better about committing these little Messages from the Muse to some sort of media so that I don’t forget them. How did amateur musicians who can’t read music ever survive without cell phones? Yes, cassettes, I know — and I have a couple boxes of them to prove it. But… so clunky. Remember fast-forward? Yuck.

Speaking of fast-forward… Fast-forward to 2023. My music recording hard drive crashed this fall (aaarrrghhhh!!!) — but, no worries, I was able to recover most of the files. As a kind of enforced bonus, I ended up re-organizing thousands of files. Among the many long-forgotten bits was that guitar riff from 2010.

I realized immediately that I had a head start on this year’s Christmas song. The rest of the music, and all of the lyrics, came together in a few hours one weekend in late October. I quickly developed a second guitar part to complement the first, recorded them and sent them off to my recording partner and dear friend from college, Peter Curtiss. Peter liked what he heard and came up with a beautiful piano part to complement the guitars.

Peter’s original recording of the piano part made it through the production process mostly untouched, and is what you hear here. The funny thing is that it had a mistake — a single note with an unpleasant dissonance against one of the guitar parts. After realizing what happened, Peter wanted to re-record his part, but I told him to hold off on that. Turns out that I loved his “mistake” — rather than change what Peter did, I decided to change the guitar parts to match his part. You can hear it in the song, but it is difficult to pick out because, well, it doesn’t sound like a mistake anymore. If anything, it elevated the song quite a bit. Thank you Peter. Please make more mistakes in the future.

Although Promise Me is very different from Sing For Joy, it does borrow a small part of a chord progression. As I write more Christmas songs in the coming years (God willing), I thought it might be nice to connect them in some way from year to year. So this year’s connection is the descending chord trio of Bm → BbMaj7 → [A], which also appears in Sing For Joy. Technically, the “A” is A7sus here and Am7 in Sing for Joy, but it’s the same basic idea. I’ve always liked that particular progression.

With Peter’s part in hand, I spent a couple weekends assembling the final recording. It’s all me except Peter’s piano. Also, many thanks to my nephew and audio wizard, Jim Marchione, for helpful comments on various mixes, without which this would not sound nearly as good as it does. Seriously, he is one of the most talented audio engineers you’ll find outside of the major music centers around the country.

The song is about a person whose true love has been away for a time, and whose life in the interim has been bleak and hollow (per the chorus). The arrangement is simple, but there is purpose behind it. In lieu of drums or heavy percussion, I used sleigh bells as a rhythm component, particularly in the hopeful, “Christmassy” sections. The sleigh bells temporarily change to a starker “tap tap tap” in the darker-themed chorus, and evolve again, albeit very briefly, into a “thump” — a heartbeat borne of anticipation, before the song returns to the joy and hope of the sleigh bells. There’s a larger allegory there too, for those who choose to see it.

The song begins and ends with a brief musical phrase that I arranged to evoke a twinkling star. Christmas is magic to many of us. I hope the magic of the Christmas star shines bright in your life throughout this holiday season. Merry Christmas!

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I released Sing for Joy (At Christmas) on Christmas Eve 2022. It was my first attempt at writing a Christmas song. I am posting it here this year for easy access, along with this year’s new song, Promise Me (You’ll Be Home For Christmas). You can find the latter here.

I started a remix of Sing for Joy this year, with some cleaned up tracks. But the results so far are “meh” — the new tracks are an upgrade, but the overall mix isn’t quite there yet. So, with the season upon us, the remix will wait for another time, perhaps as we get closer to Christmas Day. Or next year.

The song is based on a piano riff that I first came up with in 1983, during a particularly fertile period of songwriting in my life. Over the years, I tried many times to turn the idea into a song. None of them stuck. Last fall I realized that it wanted to be a Christmas song. After I accepted that basic fact, the rest of the song mostly fell together in less than an hour.

It’s an overtly Christian song — I suppose many would call it “Christian Contemporary”. Christmas is a Christian holiday, and this song celebrates the essence of that.

In some sense, recording this song put a bow on twenty-three years of serving in church praise bands. That phase of my life has ended, having gravitated back to more ancient and traditional forms of Christian worship. Age maybe? I don’t know. That aside, I always thought that part of the job of serving in music ministry was to train younger people to take up the banner and understand how to lead a service. During my gradual transition to other forms of Christian worship, it has been gratifying to see talented younger people hear the call and lead the next generation.

I do look back fondly on those years, remembering many epic, Spirit-filled moments of inspired sound. I cherish the friendships I made with fantastic singers and instrumentalists. Maybe more than anything, this song is a token of sorts to remember that eventful quarter century, as I move on to other things. But my musical focus these days is writing and recording, rather than live performance. I have been obsessed with recording since I was very young, but the busyness of mid life made it difficult to pursue, and it all but disappeared as a pastime for quite some time. So it has been nice to return to my musical roots over the past few years.

In any case, I hope you enjoy it. Either way, have a merry and blessed Christmas season. And sing for joy.

Sojourn Song is the fourth release of the Bearded Dwarves Reunion sessions, which started in 2022. More info on who we are and why we are doing this can be found on our soundcloud. Or read the liner notes for Another Perfect Woman, also on this substack.

I wrote Sojourn Song in the summer of 1983, although it went under the name Music Star back then. It also ended up on the album I recorded in 1985, as I discuss in the notes for APW above.

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Originally conceived as a funky tribute to Jimi Hendrix’ famed 7#9 chords (think Purple Haze), it quickly evolved into its own thing, with a syncopated, smoother, change-of-pace chorus centered around descending 6th chords. Unfortunately, the original lyrics were dumb and self-indulgent at best. So I re-imagined that side of the song completely; it is now an exploration of the idea that our tenure on this earth is limited, wasted time is a terrible crime against the universe, and we all need to reach out every day to be the most effective people we can be.

As always, this arrangement features the keyboards of my recording partner, Peter Curtiss, throughout. His organ and piano parts evolve and interact from start to finish. They range from ballsy, improvised organ riffs, to light-hearted piano arpeggios, to challenging, syncopated motifs that make you wonder what just happened. I played, sang & arranged the other tracks, to provide a solid groove for all that keyboard joy to dance upon. And, as always, I did the engineering & mixing.

Unlike a couple of our prior re-imaginings over the past couple years, I didn’t add anything to this particular song (new lyrics and title aside) — the song structure is exactly how we played it as a duet in 1983. Except, of course, this recorded arrangement has a lot more going on.

Thanks for listening. Enjoy.

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We don’t have access to professional facilities, and are thus engineering and producing the recordings ourselves, learning as we go, working two thousand miles apart, exchanging files remotely. Not surprisingly, as we get better at this, each recording tends to be a little more polished than the last.

I wrote Another Perfect Woman during my senior year in college, a few years before The Causal Attraction of Two (which we recorded and released late in 2022 – also available here). I recorded a poppier version of APW myself in 1985, which mostly missed the mark (much like everything else from those sessions – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?). I quite literally recorded an album by myself, start to finish. And by “start” I mean using the first $10,000 that I earned as an aerospace engineer to buy a bunch of semi-professional multi-track recording equipment. Ah, the Tascam 38 – I still own it. So I had to learn how to use and maintain the equipment first, figure out how to arrange songs, not to mention mix the final recordings, develop cover art, and coordinate the manufacturing. I did enlist a little help here and there – a guitar lead here, a sax part there, etc. And my older brother provided a lot of moral support and input. But it was basically me and what little money and talent I could muster.

It was a great learning experience, to be sure, if only for a long list of “don’t ever do that again” lessons. Digital drums were new back then, and programming them required experience, taste and a sensibility that I lacked. It is remarkable that I was able to produce ten legitimate, if deeply flawed, recordings. Now, to be fair, the person who mastered it at the pressing facility did a horrendous job, which didn’t help. But it wouldn’t have mattered. In the end, it was a vanity project before vanity projects were cool. And it wasn’t very good.

But the album had a few songs on it that had some merit as songs, and Another Perfect Woman is one of them. It’s basically “blue-eyed soul”, as they used to refer to The Righteous Brothers and early Hall & Oates. Sadly, I can’t sing like those guys, and I don’t have the skills or aspiration to write mass market songs like they did. And, well, I have brown eyes.

This version of Another Perfect Woman is more of what I think the song wants to be – a soulful, reflective lament of a broken heart. To add a layer of complexity to the story, I decided to add a bridge and an extended ending, both new in 2023. The mood changes completely in the bridge, with the protagonist entertaining a playful dream of what might have been. As the dream ends to a foreboding timpani roll, the song returns to the bluesy riff, now accompanied by a Nietzsche-inspired lyric of despair in the third verse, leading to a “big” final chorus orchestration to underline the theme of the song. The song ends with an extended instrumental over the bridge, returning to a dream state until finally fading away after one final roll of the timpani. Except it’s not a timpani now. Interpret as you wish.

My dear friend and partner in musical crime Peter Curtiss plays the electric and acoustic pianos, plays the synthesizer solo, and helped with the arrangement. I wrote the song, play the other instruments, sing the vocal parts and engineered and mixed the recording.

Thanks for listening. Enjoy.

I wrote this song in 1986, while living in State College, PA while in graduate school. It was a weird time of life. I had left my first career of aerospace engineering after being offered an opportunity to pursue some graduate research in semiconductor technology -- which, as it turned out, interested me even less than aerospace engineering. Of course, I was actually pretty good at aerospace engineering. Not so much with semiconductors.

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I believe it was shortly after the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, a sad affair that I watched with a few of the giggly undergrads I was living with (along with one other guy who was doing graduate work on logistics -- there were always copies of some trade newspaper laying around with stories about this or that tanker being delayed in port, or whatever). Anyway, that was a depressing day. And I also found myself in a graduate quantum mechanics course, my head swimming in bizarre concepts that I didn't understand. Fortunately, the professor was a very nice old fella who was very helpful (I think he personally knew some of the really old-timer quantum geeks from the early 20th century).

Between that class and another that was a deep dive into Lagrangian mechanics (which, weirdly, did interest me), my head was spinning for weeks. So I found myself sitting on my bed with my guitar, and I was picking the chords to a favorite old standard of mine, Moonlight In Vermont. If you’re familiar with that song, it has a really interesting chord change at the end of the second line of the verse – a ninth chord with a unexpected deep dive to a bass note in the melody (…falling leaves a sycaMORE). I always loved that note. So I said to myself, “Self, go ahead and steal it.” So I did. I didn’t steal anything else – just that chord and that note. Which is hardly a theft really, because, if that were the standard, every song ever written would be an act of thievery. But it is such a unique and obvious melodic hook, I suppose my little act of thievery stands out a little more. But, hey, I’ll own it. There’s a fine line between theft and homage.

So I wrote the song -- a love song that simultaneously explores the philosophical basis of truth. Yeah, that'll get her heart pumpin'...

It was around this time that my three-year musical collaboration with a dear friend was coming to an end. I was a 1984 Princeton graduate; he was 1986. We wrote a lot of songs together. Apparently, sometime that spring I returned to eastern PA, and Peter and I found some time to play some music. And, also apparently, I showed him this song, and he liked it. I have no recollection, TBH (I suppose my head was still spinning from semiconductors, quantum mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics). But I do know that Peter and I rekindled our collaboration in 2022, and committed to recording all our songs. And I found it curious that Peter suggested that we record this one early on – curious because we only learned this song at the very end of our tenure in the 80’s, and probably never even played it out. But Peter thought we should make it a priority. And so we did. And this is the result. The song is very close to the original, except I thought it needed “something”. So I added the intro and bridge in the fall of 2022. We both liked it, so this version includes it. And a pretty little cello part.

Finally, many thanks to my nephew, Jim Marchione, for mixing it for us (and adding some cool nuance). He is quite the audio genius, if you should ever need someone to mix a record for you. Enjoy.