“The Road Less Traveled”

I’m about finished writing a new song, and this one is interesting…to me anyway. So, I thought I’d write a little bit about the process.

The Road Less Traveled is what I might call a waiting-for-tango song. I have a book of micro-stories called Café Chronicles that I published a few years ago, and although I have about 30 more little stories, I haven’t gotten around to publishing them yet. Somewhere along the way, however, I started a different series called Waiting for Tango.

The first one was inspired the day I walked into a bar while I was waiting for a tango class to start. The place I entered was a corner bar in Skokie, Illinois, on an extraordinarily hot day, looking to cool off before class. Immediately, I started feeling uncomfortable. I got the sense they didn’t want me in there. One of the guys in the bar thought I was a cop and started asking me a lot of questions. Every time I answered one of his questions, he relayed my answer to the rest of the patrons. It was an odd experience and I learned more about that guy in the time it took me to drink a beer than I ever thought possible. In the end, I guess he trusted me because he did offer to sell me some drugs, but even that was awkward as he, again, yelled it across the bar.

Since then, I have written about ten Waiting for Tango stories. But, while waiting for tango at More Brewing Company in Villa Park, Illinois, across the street from Strut Dance Studio, I was inspired to write a song instead. It wasn’t that the place was particularly inspiring, but the foundation for the song came out rather quickly. This poor song went through several iterations but had two key ideas. The first was and is my desire to return to Chicago. That was the easier of the two ideas to incorporate. The second was that I was going to hand my heart to the woman behind the bar so she could put it in the ice bin.

As it turns out, that idea was the hardest to keep. Combining bartender, heart, and ice bin in a single line was rough. The song sat for nearly two years. Every now and then, I would pull it out and try to rework it to no avail.

The other day, I was playing around with the 12-bar blues progression, trying to stuff all my fingers into a B7, especially in the turnaround. “The Road Last Traveled” popped into my head, and I wondered if I could put it into that blues progression. I was able to rewrite a few of the verses and even get “I hand my heart to the barkeep, so she can put it on ice” into the progression.

I am happy with the song. The chords and progression are basic seventh chords and follow the normal 12-bar progression. But, well, since it is a Chicago song about loss and finding your way back home, which I wrote while waiting for a dance class that is predicated on tango, a type of blues music dealing with loss and finding your way back home, the blues makes perfect sense.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll see if I can’t record a very simple demo of the song. I’ll let you know.