.
Here's the story:
This one's for my dear ol' dad, who passed away 10 years ago today.
I wrote and recorded it on March 2, 2009, with some updates to the recording through March 23, 2009. Recorded in mangobananas studio (Ithaca) using piano (EXS24 sampler), drum synth (Ultrabeat), marimba (EXS24 sampler); plus vocals (with Enverb envelope-following reverb).
The only other song that sort of addressed his death, however obliquely, was "stay the course", which was finished as he died but was really written about the war in Iraq.
I grew up in a house full of music. We had a piano in the house as long as I can remember, and there was a late-nineteenth century pump organ around for most or the 1980s, as I recall. My dad played the French horn, occasionally. Both my parents played the piano, Mom more than Dad. But Dad played a pretty fine "Moonlight Sonata", as I recall. Mom can read music really well, and played Christmas carols while the whole family sang around the piano. Dad acted and sang in the Cornell Savoyards in the '70s and '80s, and even got me involved in one show, playing the Lord Chancellor's page in Iolanthe.
On top of that love of song and stage, my parents had vinyl records. I remember so well the smell and feel of those big album covers, the sleeves with lyrics, the feeling of unexploded potential browsing the spines of the hundreds of titles in the big shelf of albums in the living room when I was growing up. There were tons of Gilbert & Sullivan records, plus Bach, Mozart, and other classical composers. But, most interesting to me, there were many albums from The Beatles, plus Simon and Garfunkel, The Carpenters, and Joni Mitchell's Miles of Aisles. We had Beatles songbooks on the piano that I took to my room when I got a guitar for my thirteenth birthday.
This ended up on my album all over the map, from 2013.
Thanks for listening!
-Andy
where's your dad?
without knowing it
I was trying too hard
without saying it
trying to follow his footsteps
on the wind
pushing me
on the wind
warning me
on the wind
soaring
on the wind
memories
stupid stupid
so everlasting
baffled
how to execute
why there is no
point
here
still
even
though
gone
lyrics 2 March 2009 by Andy Wyatt
music 2-23 March 2009 by Andy Wyatt
©2009 by The Andy Band
Pix (from top to bottom) are circa 2001 (at Kelly's Dockside), 1973 (Christmas carols around the piano), 1974 (Christmas gumdrop house), 1975 (Christmas tree on VW Beetle), 1976 (tying my hockey skates), 1967 (Christmas), 2000 (January on a beach in Thailand).