"Words are only words but we turn them into gifts... then we seem confused as their meaning slowly shifts"

This year, give the gift of words and music

19 songs (18 written by me) played by some really cool players.

Not just the sheet music to those songs but the stories behind what inspired me to write them.

Over 100 poems in a limited edition of 200 signed and numbered copies.

Raised In Vain / Afterthought....Dave Tutin songs volume one....or words to that effect...

all available from amazon.com.

One from the archives: Blue Highways

This is quite strange. I was clicking through my archives a couple days ago and found this song. But I ignored it because I was totally convinced I'd written about it already. A search of my own blog revealed that I hadn't. Maybe I meant to and never got around to it. 

Well, it's called Blue Highways. And that's a "borrowed" title. It comes from a great book by William Least Heat-Moon. Losing his job as a teacher in New York (if I remember correctly) William, reassuming his Native American name in the process, takes off on a trip not across America but literally around it. He kind of circumnavigates the country using only the roads marked in blue on the maps - the back roads. Hence the title, Blue Highways. Even though, technically, highways were what he avoided.

It's a great read.

My song of the same title takes a little less optimistic view than William's book. I wrote it when I found myself in one of those middle-of-nowhere towns that could only exist in this country. The words tell the story, so I won't elaborate here.

Download 06 Blue Highways 1 

A good problem to have, I guess.

Writers are the first to get paranoid when they haven't written anything for a while. We think maybe the ability has left us and that we'll never write again.

So we learn to enjoy it when the opposite happens. I've been writing a lot recently. Which, as I said, is a nice problem to have. The only downside is that I've been writing a lot of songs. And unlike other forms of writing where the words are an end in themselves, songs have that extra, complicated stage to go through of being recorded - of the words being brought to life with music. I'm starting work on a new album but I already have too many songs! It'll be an interesting task to decide which ones make it and which don't.

That said, here's the words to the latest:

MERCIFUL RELEASE

I want to see the blue sky

where no building blocks the sun

Don't care how many years I've had

I want to feel like I've just begun

I want to make it

out of the city

I want to make it

in one piece

I've been dreaming for so long

of this merciful release

I want to tell my father

wherever he may be

Your son made it out alive

Your son is finally free

I want to make it 

out of the city

I want to make it

in one piece

I've been dreaming for so long

of this merciful release

I don't understand the music of the city no more

Every day's a fight but I'm not sure what I'm fighting for

I want to see the desert

to the mountains slowly climb

The rocks that change so slowly

they seem unchanged in one lifetime

I want to make it

out of the city

I want to make it

in one piece

I've been dreaming for so long

of this merciful release

©2008 Dave Tutin / openDmusic

And then the Experience was over

The last surviving member of The Jimi Hendrix Experience - drummer Mitch Mitchell - died today. Noel Redding joined Jimi in 2003 and now the band is reunited.

There are some wild sounds coming out of heaven tonight...or somewhere!

A new song started in Montreal and finished in New York 24 hours later. Oddly enough it's about time.

THE LIKES OF YOU AND ME

There's the way it was

The way it is

And the way it soon will be

But they might as well be different worlds

For the likes of you and me

Some people stay in one place

It's there they live and die

But life is not that simple

For the likes of you and I

There's killing time

And time to kill

And time to wait and see

But time is just a lame excuse

For the likes of you and me

We'll never know the reason

That grown men bend and cry

There's no light beyond the sunset

For the likes of you and I

Nothing changes

Nothing stays

Unchanged - forever free

Everything is here and now

For the likes of you and me

People talk in twisted riddles

Of how they've seen time fly

But the time is always now

For the likes of you and I

It's like it never happened

Except inside your head

For the likes of you and me

It's all better left unsaid

There's the way it is

The way it was

And the way it soon will be

But they might as well be different worlds

For the likes of you and me

Some people stay in one place

It's there they live and die

But life is not that simple

For the likes of you and I

©2008 Dave Tutin / openDmusic

A lesson in stupidity

This man had one of the highest approval ratings ever in the first survey taken after the horror of 9/11. He had the sympathy of the entire world, excluding those who attacked us. Who, of course, had nothing to do with the country he then chose to attack.

He will leave office with the lowest approval rating in history - less popular than Nixon when he resigned.

Even before he is President, Obama has already changed America. Hopefully we will, in future, recognize an idiot when we see and hear one.

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen” - Leonardo da Vinci

If I know anything at all about poetry, and believe me that's a big if, it is that Leonardo's description comes closer than any other definition I've read.

I think poems do indeed paint pictures. They capture frozen moments in time, or frozen emotions in the flow of life. Well mine attempt to, at least. Who knows if they succeed? The reader cannot possibly know the sights, sounds and tastes of the moments that inspired them. Maybe that's the point. Maybe it's when a moment from one life finds a mirror in another life, a moment similar enough to be relived through the same words, that we truly connect as souls lost in a similar place. 

Which is why most of my poems will mean very little to most people most of the time. But in a collection of over a hundred poems maybe just one or two will allow us to meet in a deeper fashion.

if you want to find out, or words to that effect is now available at amazon.com. For the very worldly sum of $20 we might be able to meet on a different level.

It's a strictly limited edition of 200 numbered, signed copies. 

Don't worry about the 'out of stock' warning, order it and it will arrive.

November 4th, 2008

The day America woke up.

Finding "new strength" in a new song

LIFE GOES ON

It's easier not to try

To say your time is past

your time is gone

But life goes on

Wiser now but sadder too

You have to find new strength

to call upon

As life goes on

Edges dulled by time don't cut as clean

The anger is still there but not as keen

Carrying the weight of all you've seen

makes the future seem so brief

the past so long

But life goes on

Addictive eyes and haunting smile

You believed with all your heart

she was the one

But life goes on

The night was once another day

Passion lit the room

like a midnight sun

But life goes on

Edges dulled by time don't cut as clean

The anger is still there but not as keen

Carrying the weight of all you've seen

makes the future seem so brief

the past so long

But life goes on

©2008 Dave Tutin/openDmusic

A poem too late for the book

YOU AND ME

I'd tell you what I know

But I'm not sure it's true

I may have dreamed it all

I may have dreamed you too

©2008 Dave Tutin