New Song on Video: 'Fly, Baby, Fly'

Like many songwriters, I suppose, I've always felt a little reluctant to describe what inspired the lyrics for any of my songs.  First, many of my songs are not just drawn from one single inspiration about one specific thing.  Often a song is a collection of thoughts, feelings and ideas that seem to somehow come together.  Second, I  like each individual listener to be able to take away from the song what they hear, relate to and are moved by.  I have a concern that if I give too much away, it prevents the listener from deriving their own unique meaning from it.

But I also share a fascination with the songwriters I am interested in, as to what were the real-life people, events, and emotions that went into their works that I enjoy.

So I wrote this new song, yesterday, and shot a video performance of it which appears above.

What I'd like to say about it is this.  Throughout my life, there have been those people and groups, some in my life directly, and some out in the American culture at large, who have supported my creative spirit and specifically, my desire - well, need, really, to write songs and share them with people.  And there have been others who have not been supportive, who have, directly or indirectly, strongly urged me not to pursue my creativity and my dreams for it.

I also see now that this is the experience of almost every creative artist I know.  We seem to internalize it, until it becomes a never-ending series of battles in our minds, always the same.  Do your art, don't do your art.  This inner war can be very painful.  Because for me, the voice that tells me to do my art, to follow my creative ideas, to write and play my music, is the voice of my True Self.  Call it my heart, my soul, my spirit, my Inner Artist.  The other voice, the voice that told me not to do my art, was really just a recording of all those other voices out in the world, who told me it would be scary, and/or dangerous, and/or just plain wrong to create new things from my talents and gifts, and to share them with people. I just replayed that recording again and again.  In essence, I was telling myself not to be who I truly am.

So this song is for me, and for everyone who has ever had a creative impulse, an artistic idea, a dream, but who has had to fight that negative voice in their head, just to get it out.  Let's all listen to our true, inner voices, and fly, baby, fly!

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