I enjoyed writing this song. It is essentially one day of conversations put to music. Every word and every image from that day made it into the song. The imagery of clouds dancing and fish flying is from a pond where I stopped for lunch. Rosaline is a reference to a character from Romeo and Juliet. She is never seen in the play but becomes an interesting catalyst for the tragedy when she doesn’t show up at the party.
Feel free to leave comments on the YouTube page. I’d love to hear from you.
On April 24th, 2025, a band I put together played their first gig. This was a project that was about three years in the making. I’m going to outline how this came about, what went well, and what mistakes were made along the way.
Back in 2022, I started writing songs and playing guitar in earnest. Truth be told, I bought my first guitar in 1997 or so, learned a few things, and even wrote a song, but put it away for years at a time. Every once in a while, I would pull it out and try again, but I struggled with it. Around 2020, I got a new guitar and realized that it was much easier to play, and I soon realized that my struggles were not all me but a guitar that was poorly set up.
With that new guitar, I learned a bunch of new chords and some techniques and started writing songs. I wrote a couple of very simple songs starting in 2021, and at some point, shared them with a musician friend of mine who ran an open mic. She convinced me, in the fall of 2021, to get on stage and play some songs. Even back then, I mostly played originals. My thinking was that I didn’t want to butcher other people’s songs.
That first time onstage, I was terrified. My legs shook, and when I heard myself in the monitor, I sounded so loud that I backed away from the microphone. I had no idea that people couldn’t hear me at all when I did that. In spite of all that anxiety, I was hooked and started playing open mics wherever I could find them.
In 2022, I wrote over 20 songs and fragments of many, many more. All the songs over the next two years told the story of a semi-unrequited love that became more unrequited as time went on. I threw myself into the pain of that situation, knowing full well what I was doing.
I played as many open mics as I could find. When I was in Illinois, I traveled from Palatine to Oak Lawn and from Downers Grove to Rogers Park. When I was in Central Pennsylvania, I would drive up to 1 1/2 hours each way to go to open mics, as there was not much going on musically in State College. In many ways, there still isn’t much going on. They need more venues that have adequate space and don’t cater exclusively to undergrads, as they don’t have much interest in small original bands.
In the summer of 2024, I walked into a Gallery Cabaret on a Tuesday night. They had just changed the format of what they were doing that night, and I had no idea it was a type of open mic. The guy running it knew me and asked me if I wanted to play. Luckily, I had my guitar in the car, so I said yes.
A few minutes later, he came up to me and gave me the lineup for the band he put together for me. I was in a state of panic. I had never done that before, and I, for the most part, play originals. I got on stage with a lead guitarist, a drummer, and a bass player, gave them keys for each song, and somehow we played. It was a great feeling. From then on, when I went to open mics that had “spare parts” as they were called at one place, I would grab some people and put little makeshift bands together. My favorite place to do this was The Outta Space in Berwyn. The guys I played with there added so much to my simple little songs.
I started to learn what fit with what I do and what didn’t. I also found ways my songs could be pushed.
When I got back to State College, PA, the last remaining truly open mic had closed. There was almost no place to play on a regular basis. Eventually, one opened in a town about 30 minutes away, but it just didn’t have the same vibe. I would go, but it was not the place where you’d meet musicians.
A few months later, someone started an original, open mic at the bowling alley bar. He came in with a drum kit, and I thought it would work out. Unfortunately, he only brought the drums out once and started booking opening acts who were then supposed to support the open-mic players. Most of the time, when they were done, they just wanted to get out. I started to dread going, but I kept at it.
By February, the open mic was struggling to find opening bands, and he started taking solo players. I said I would play the 45-minute opening set, and we settled on May 8. I figured if I had that time and a secured gig, I might be able to dig up a band, and if I couldn’t, I would play solo. Eventually, I found some people, but we were all involved with other projects, so we didn’t get much of a chance to rehearse until the end of March. I figured it was fine, we’d have plenty of time. Then the date got moved up to April 24, and we were only able to meet twice as a full band to rehearse.
On April 24th, Surly Martyrs made their debut. People seem to enjoy it, but as usual, I struggled to believe them. There was no one whom I really trusted to gauge the performance.
I did learn some things about where I want to take the music next. I just hope we can keep the core together and that they will be willing to help me build toward the really vague vision I have.
I am uploading most of the songs to My YouTube Channel.
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.
It’s that time of year when musicians from around the world gather virtually and try to write an album’s worth of songs in 28 days. Yes, FAWM is where you try to write 14 songs in the shortest month of the year.
Last year was the first time I came across FAWM, and as I had just started writing songs late in life, I thought it would be fun. And indeed it was. I was able to write 14 or so songs, although some of them only had lyrics. (Yes, I am a lyric first writer.)
I would say that out of the 14 songs, there were a couple that I really liked. Some of the others still need a bit of work. Now, many people actually come up with fully formed songs that sound like they were professionally recorded. I am amazed when people can do that. What I do is generally a little different. I’m posting the equivalent of scratch tracks. It’s just me and a guitar. I try to clean up the sound a little, but it is as bare-bones as you can get. I am pretty sure that there was at least one song that I just recorded on my phone.
This year, it is February 3rd already, and I only have one song up. I have some that I’m working on, but I feel like I’m behind. I may be able to get a very raw song up tonight, which would put me on track to a certain degree.
Part of the problem is that the bar/music venue where I liked to write lyrics has decided to eliminate live music, and I really haven’t found a replacement venue with the same vibe. I like to write in public spaces, but I’m just not going out as much. I have other excuses for my laziness, but I’m going to stick with that one for now.
Anyway, if you want to check out my very bare-bones recordings, you can find me on SoundCloud, YouTube, and of course, for a month, you can find me on FAWM.
This post may go off in a rather unintended direction. Hold on tight. It also made me somewhat uncomfortable in its self-indulgence, but maybe it was what I needed to write tonight. Recently, I started rewatching The Good Place, created by Michael Schur. It’s my kitchen show. I have a computer in the kitchen that I’ll put on while I’m cooking or cleaning. For the record, I love the show. I think it is wonderfully written, and the ensemble works well together. Sometimes, I even dawdle in the kitchen to see a bit more of it. I highly recommend it to everyone. It really should be required viewing before starting life. I really want to write something more about that show, but this is not the night for that.
Tonight, I noticed that Schur had produced another show called A Man on the Inside with many of the same actors from The Good Place. Now, Schur was already well known for The Office and Parks and Rec., but I particularly liked the comedic timing of The Good Place, so I sat down to watch an episode.
The show stars Ted Danson as a retired widower. I won’t give away any spoilers, mostly because I haven’t seen enough to know any, but also just because. I will say that Danson’s character is that of a retired professor. Although I’m not retired nor a widower, the character resonated with me. Though I still work, I am a professor and live alone like the character. My routine is not nearly as clean and precise as his, but tonight, as I prepared several containers of filtered water, I saw the character in myself.
One of the songs in the show was “For a Dancer” by Jackson Browne. A sample of the lyrics goes like this:
I don’t remember losing track of you
You were always dancing in and out of view
I must’ve thought you’d always be around
Again, I’m not a widower, but I thought about all of the life partners or potential life partners who I thought would “always be around” but who I lost track of. The loss isn’t quite the same, but the result is. I am an old professor living alone with my routines. On one level, I am resigned to this life. I’m pretty sure I’m going the last mile alone. However, I am not resigned to not making a difference in this world, nor am I resigning myself to death. Double negatives be damned, I will not go quietly.
I think I’ve been on this path for decades without knowing it. I am hurtling toward something I control in a way that many artists do. I write stories, blogs, novels, songs, plays, and, yes, even academic articles and books. I have been in plays, made a little movie, performed my music in front of live audiences, and recorded those performances to put on the internet and computer hard drives. I have even been a photographer whose photos have appeared in newspapers, and I’ve been a painter. I do all these things, in part, to avoid death.
On some level, I have already achieved immortality. I have books and articles in the libraries, and some of my words have been quoted by others in their books and articles, which may very well be in other libraries and bookshelves around the world. My plays have been produced in two or three countries, and my novels and stories have been purchased by people around the world.
Right now, I am furiously working on my music. I have recorded a few songs, and I’m waiting for them to be mixed and mastered so I can share them with the world as well.
I have lived a spectacular life. Sometimes, when I’m down, I feel like I’ve wasted my life, but when I really think of it, damn, it has been a remarkable life, and I want to share that life one way or another. One of my new favorite Buddhist teachers, Matthew Brensilver, ends most of his dharma talks with the line, “Take what is useful, leave the rest behind.” I have seen a good deal of the world and met some of the most fascinating people. I’ve done most of what a human can do in a single lifetime. I have lived, loved, lost, and lived again. I’ve cheated death and seen sacrifice that kept me alive. I’m going to share that with you. If there is anything there of use, take it; leave the rest behind.
I read a story yesterday about a guy. Now, for so many reasons, I won’t repeat the story word for word, but I will get the gist of the story, which led, not to a revelation for me, although maybe it should.
It was a story about a guy, as I mentioned, who decided to find the perfect partner. So, he searched the world for a woman he thought would be perfect for him. He met a great woman, and she had so many good qualities that he thought maybe she could be the one. Unfortunately, she didn’t share his love of reading, so he had to move on.
In another town, he met another woman. She was smart, attractive, funny, and loved to read, but she wasn’t very athletic. Our young searcher was a runner, and he wanted someone to accompany him, so he passed.
In town after town, he searched, coming up with women who were almost perfect but not perfect. As he was about to give up, he met a woman who ticked every box on his list. She was absolutely perfect so he asked her to marry him, sadly she declined as she was looking for the perfect man.
Now, I’m sure almost everyone could learn something from this story, but what happened to me was a little different. I read that story in a café on a Sunday afternoon. About an hour later, I was at a different cafe in a different town to play an open mic. It was almost time for me to play. My guitar was tuned, and I had my playlist ready. I was going to play one song I had just written that morning and a few songs I almost never play in public, as I am still thinking about them. The singer before me gave a little intro about her final song, and I thought, “Of course, the story. I have to write a song that has elements of the story I read that morning into a new song.
That is the beauty of creativity, or perhaps my lack thereof. I had read a story about the dangers of seeking perfection in a text about mindfulness, I had my guitar in hand, and someone mentioned a breakup. All of those elements had to come together in order for me to think about writing a new song. Now, it may take me a while to write it, but I did jot down some notes. When I finish it, I’ll have to post a video of it here.
And I hope you see all the chaos going on around you and put it into some sort of order and share it with the world.
I used to use sites such as Facebook to collect random thoughts and share them with people I know. However, I do not wish to actively participate on a platform that thinks of women as objects or encourages the denigration of people based on orientation, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc. So, I will put my random thoughts here. I will keep the platform for now, as I don’t want to lose touch with friends. And hell, facebook keeps buying everything, so it is nearly impossible to escape them.
I was bouncing around the internet this evening, and I saw a menu from Woolworths. I highly recommend looking up the history of the company, which started as a 5 and Dime in Utica, NY, and later in Lancaster, PA, in 1879. Some people may remember it from the sit-ins in the early 60s. Others may remember it from the 2000 movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou.
I remember it as where I had lunch in the 90s when I was a manager at Montogomery Ward at the Yorktown Mall. At some point, I will have to add an entry into what I did there, but my friend and I had the entire floor where they used to house Discover Cards for our office. I think we were in our early 20s at that point. Woolworths more or less ceased to be in 1997, and I think that was the time it left the mall. Technically, the company is still around, but it is very different.
The one at Yorktown had a lunch counter, and my friend and I would often go there for lunch when we were at our office. Here is, I’m pretty sure, a menu from that era. I’m not putting the whole menu because, more often than not, I got the burger.
So, there it is… a simple memory.
A few years ago, I fell in love. So, with intention, I sat down to write a love song. I was in Logan Square in Chicago, so I looked for an inspirational place to write a love song. I came across a bar that had an indoor waterfall and was described as quirky. I thought that a waterfall in a quirky bar would give me exactly the mood I was looking for to write a love song.
It was relatively early as far as Chicago bars go, so there weren’t many people when I walked in, so I sat at the bar in front of the waterfall. I thought it was perfect, except for the lighting. The bar was extremely dark. There were candles on the bar (I don’t remember if they were electric or real.) so I grabbed a candle and held it close to the blank paper. The candle flickered on the page. This was perfect.
As I looked around, I could see that the bar had other quirky features. In fact, it started to give the vibe of a place that launched a thousand doomed relationships. The bartender came over, and I ordered a bourbon. The heavily tatted and pierced bartender looked like they had some stories to tell as well. Nevertheless, I wrote “This is a Love Song” on the page to reaffirm what I was doing. I was here to write romantic lyrics.
I was stuck. The energy in the room, as more patrons showed up, threw me. I didn’t know where to start, so I jotted down, “This is the start of a love song.” After all, love songs need to start somewhere, and hell, Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote a love song called Your Song about a guy who wrote a love song for someone. It was a meta-love song. I could write a song about a love song. In Taupin-John song, the protagonist talks about finishing the love song. I could certainly write a love song that includes the beginning of the love song. In my song, the protagonist names the person he’s writing the song for, the ubiquitous “you.”
So far, the song was going well. The protagonist is writing a song for a special someone. Then I thought, why is the protagonist writing said love song? He states that he wants to get through to you. So, there is a bit of a disconnect between the protagonist and the woman he’s in love with. That happens.
Then I got to the chorus. The room was filling up and I was looking at people as they were coming together. I thought of all the possibilities for finding love in the world today. I started to get a little cynical about the whole thing, but I tried to stay on task. I thought an ordinary love song wouldn’t work today. People are a little more jaded. “And it’s not like other love songs.” Yes, that’s great. I have to write a love song that stands out in a world of trite love songs. My own cynicism was growing. My song might not be like other love songs, but let’s face it: it’s trying to manipulate you into loving me. The verse ends with, “But like all the other love songs, it plays you for a fool.”
Things went downhill from there. The protagonist feels the need to apologize, but he knows that he’s doing this for expediency. He doesn’t really mean it. He knows the offending behavior is going to happen again. But that doesn’t matter. He just wants back in. The song continues down that road and has the potential to be pretty dark.
Here is the song performed live at OuttaSpace in Berwyn, IL. I will add that after performing this song that night, I started thinking that the song wasn’t finished. I think, perhaps, it needs another voice. I want to hear what the woman has to say about what the protagonist is attempting to do.
Although the process for writing each song varies, and I’ll get into other songs, most of my songs tell stories. After all, I’m a storyteller. It’s what I do. If I get stuck, and if you want, you can take this as advice If you get stuck, I will keep thinking of the lyrics as pushing the narrative forward. If you’re out there living life and taking in everything around you. You’ll never run out of stories to tell or ways to tell them. I know I haven’t.
From my understanding of the world, the one thing that really separates humans from everything else on our planet is our desire for art in all its forms. Simply, we need the arts. We can’t go a day without some sort of beauty in our lives. I might even argue that we would cease to exist without art. Today, I want to offer an oversimplified argument for increasing arts, literature, music, and dance at all levels of education.
Let me start with the importance of art in our lives. A while ago, I wrote a book called Masking the Past, which should be published soon. While researching the book, I came across remarkable drawings made by Spanish children from the time of the Spanish Civil War. These children had been traumatized by the bombings, the death, the destruction of everything they knew. So, where did they turn? They turned to art. They wanted to depict their world in drawings as a way to understand it, as a way to ameliorate the traumas they suffered.
On some level, we all do this. When we go through something difficult, we turn to art to help us understand and to soothe our wounds. It could be anything from a Taylor Swift song about getting over a breakup, a romcom, or a play about Iranians taking an ESL class. To return to the Spanish Civil War, even a painting such as Picasso’s Guernica helped him and others deal with the bombings.
Even with this need, politicians and many administrators are removing arts from the curriculum or encouraging students to avoid literature, music, dance, and art education. The claim is that they won’t make any money. Even parents encourage or force their children to turn away from the arts. They want them to be engineers, doctors, or go into business.
The problem is that we have engineers, doctors, and business people who don’t know how to think. They can only replicate what they’ve been taught at universities, which have moved away from education and toward over-priced trade schools. That’s fine if there were no problems in the world, but the fact is that everyone, at some point in their lives, will confront a situation that is unlike anything they have seen before, and if they can’t think outside the engineering, doctoring or businessing boxes, they will fail.
Politicians do this all the time. Let’s take a hot-button issue like the Mexican-US border. This is a relatively easy issue to fix, but the people in charge do not have the ability to think creatively about the situation. They want to put up walls and increase patrols. But you don’t fix the border at the border. If you’ve never seen a film from Latin America about immigration. If you’ve never read a novel from that part of the world, you cannot understand the issue, and you cannot fix it. If you had read some novels, short stories or watched films by Latin Americans dealing with those issues, you’d realize that, for the most part, people don’t want to leave. You find out that what is driving them to the border is insecurity. One way to combat that, both at home and abroad, is to create opportunity.
In Central America, creating opportunity is easy. You use taxes to incentivize companies to move manufacturing to those countries. A simple change like that gives people jobs, it gives them hope, it gives them a purpose in life. They turn away from violence. They stay with family and friends and community because they can. There are some unintended consequences of this move as well. You reduce shipping costs and pollution due to the proximity of these countries. You solve the supply chain problem that CEOs have been unable to fix by encouraging the diversification of the supply chain.
The reason you don’t see this happening is that most Americans lack empathy. Well, any country that places STEM over the arts will have this issue. Now, we don’t lack empathy because something is inherently wrong with us. It has been systematically removed by really poor politics and a misunderstanding of education.
Now, some people might think that they will be leaving money on the table if they study arts or literature and such. Just the opposite is true. The fact is that you will advance further and faster if you have a good foundation in the arts and literature. Google did a study about what makes people move up the chain faster, and as it turns out, the list of qualities is all things that are taught in literature, arts, and music classes. And by all, I mean 100%, and these qualities are exclusively taught in the humanities and arts. Without those qualities, you will not advance nearly as fast or as far. I have met business people, engineers, and doctors with a foundation in the arts and humanities who all credit those fields with their successes.
The point is, that we need the arts, we need literature, we need music in our lives. Don’t let anyone take away what makes you human, and don’t let anyone take away what will make you a better, more successful human.
I have competing stories about when I began to play guitar and write music. The first story is that I was living in Colombia back in the nineties, had just broken up with the woman who flew my hair to Cuba to put a curse on me, bought a guitar, and wrote my first song. The second story, which is also true, is that in 2021, I bought a guitar, dedicated myself to learning to play it, fell in love with an unavailable woman, imagined a whole relationship with her, and wrote lots of songs. And yes, both of these origin stories are absolutely true.
In fact, there are some other stories about how I started that are also true. My journey is all about fits and starts. I’m going to attempt to talk about those beginnings, endings, and new beginnings within the context of one of my newer songs, “It’s You I Miss.”
I find solace in music and writing, and I always have. On some level, I’ve been making music for as long as I can remember. My earliest music-related memories were creating a “stage” with lights and a sound system in my basement as a kid and pretending I was performing to thousands of fans. I do have an earlier memory of finding speakers in the garbage, taking apart my record player, and wiring a sort of surround sound system in my bedroom. Back then, I think all I had was a smallish collection of 45s.
I was pushed into piano lessons as a kid, but I completely rebelled against that, and when I joined the band in the fourth grade, it was as a drummer. I remember going to competitions and playing in assemblies and such. Since I was the only percussionist who could read music in our group, I played the xylophone on occasion. I left the band when they wouldn’t let me stay after practice to learn more.
In high school, I remember writing some songs. One, in particular, sounded a lot, in my head, like Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” In another coincidence, most of my songs are similar to “Suzanne” in that they often imagine the different paths a relationship could take, even if they never did or even ever would.
“It’s You I Miss” is a good example of imagined circumstances in relationships. I started writing the song in the Spring of 2023 for the woman I was sort of dating or wanted to get back together with. I had broken up with her because I was still nurturing the pain of a non-existent relationship with someone else. (Yes, I am oversimplifying that situation for brevity’s sake.) By December of 2024, the relationship had evolved into a friendship, but I still hadn’t finished the song. So, in order to finish it, I needed to imagine searching for a woman I had supposedly lost.
The music was, as always, the last to come. I had originally envisioned the song as bluesy and halting. Somehow, it changed into a song that sounded more like something from The Velvet Underground or Lou Reed. This evolution makes sense for a couple of reasons. Lou Reed has multiple albums that are odes or anti-odes to New York. “It’s You I Miss” ended up being an ode to Chicago in part because, in the song, the protagonist goes to the places he went to with his girlfriend, and most of those places were in Chicago and doing some very Chicago things such as walking along the 606 or taking shots of Malort.
I have a feeling there might be multiple versions of this song in different musical styles, and part of me wants to turn it into the first song of a medley that ends with the bridgeless version of the Velvel Underground’s “Sweet Jane.”
Henry James Morello 