Below are the stories and inspirations behind each song.
I wrote this song for my wife. One night, well into the cancer battle, she asked if I would still have been with her had I known this is where it would end up. I wrote this song that night. I would rewrite sections, move one verse here and another there, but the majority of the lyrics were from the one night of writing. I wanted to make this a gift for her. I didn't feel I could properly sing this song myself, so I worked with a studio singer to have him record it. It's what is called a for-hire project. It is my song and I have complete rights to it. At the time I was playing around with trying painting again. Something I hadn't done for 20+ years. So that was kind of the inspiration for the lyrics I guess.
This is the first song I sang myself that was released. Like many of my songs, I get a phrase stuck in my head and build from it. The old saying "up shit creek without a paddle" has been around for as long as I can remember. When I was thinking of this line it struck me you would be down a paddle and up a creek. It just seemed like a good way of changing the phrase while keeping the meaning of it. The line of "Hurts too much when I fall, Your wagons are too damn tall" I used in a different song, that I never made because the line didn't have the impact I needed for that one. But when I mixed these two together, it reminded me of someone I once worked with. So I just wrote it based off of him and his struggles.
This is a song about accepting that love sometimes only flows one way. There is a difference between being in love with someone and just loving someone. It also points out that having someone in love with you can feel really good, for awhile. If you don't feel the same toward them, it can feel like too much eventually. In love means you can't imagine being without them, just loving means you don't want to hurt them but you also don't want them around either. It's a hard lesson to learn, and one I think a lot of people know, but won't admit to themselves.
I wrote this in the wake of caring for my wife with her cancer. People say things like you are doing such a great job, you are so strong and dependable. I'm just doing what needs done, sometimes badly and untimely. I have no special strength or understanding. I'm just an ordinary guy trying to figure things out. Pretty much all of us are. So this was a song to recognize that being a good person isn't about being some kind of superhero, it's just guys who do the ordinary things, even when the circumstances aren't.
This was written as a request to not make all my songs so serious and depressing. I admit to being raised on 80's music videos and I decided to not care how some think about my generations taste. I wanted to write something fun and say it's ok to find a woman attractive and say so. It's also ok for a woman to find herself attractive and be aware of guys seeing it too. So I guess this is a bit of a throwback to my yesterday.