As threatened, I am devoting a series of Tunesday posts to the songs on my album. Today is the first track, the title track, "Music No One Else Can Hear." If you don't want to hear lots of detail about how the song came to be, feel free to listen to it anyway.
The song has its roots back when I was in high school. At the time I was writing a lot of songs.* They all pretty much sucked. Most of them are long-forgotten, though I remember some titles and some passages. I have no memory of the actual song I wrote back then -- or even if I wrote one or not. But I remember the inspiration. I was hanging out at Tony's**. Actually, I was sitting on the roof of the car parked outside of Tony's. A friend, Melinda, borrowed my walkman.*** She started listening. And then she started dancing. After maybe a minute of that, she gave it back. With a slightly self-conscious laugh she said something about how she'd better stop because she's dancing to music no one else can hear. I don't remember the exact words, but that final phrase struck me as a great song title. And that's how most of my songs began back then -- with a phrase that I thought was catchy. Come to think of it, that's still how I do it a lot of the time. As I noted above, I really don't recall whether I wrote a song to the title back then.
The first version I remember anything about dates back to my grad school days. And it happens to be a pretty direct ancestor of the current song. As my first year at the University of Michigan approached its end, I started dating someone named Anne. But I went home to New York for the summer, while she spent her summer in Detroit. And, while we were apart, I wrote her a song.
I'm not entirely sure how it came together -- whether I decided to write her a song, or whether it came to me. Sitting with my guitar, I started writing to the tune of Air Supply's "All Out of Love." Air Supply's song begins:
I'm lying alone
With my head on the phone
Thinking of you 'til it hurts.
I know you hurt too
But what else can we do,
Tormented and torn apart?
I wrote:
I'm lying in bed
With you in my head
Wondering where you are now.
Tell me, can it be?
Are you thinking of me,
Even though I'm not around?
And that was my first verse. I continued with a chorus, At this point I kind of made up a melody as I went along. If I recall correctly, this was the first time I attempted writing my own melody.
Your song is with me, wherever I am,
Even when you're not here.
And all around me there's music,
Music No One Else Can Hear.
I wrote more, but I don't remember any of it. I played the song for Anne when we saw each other again at the end of the summer. I remember sitting on my bed, with my guitar, my leg shaking with nerves because I had never before played a song I wrote -- much less for the girl I had written it for. I don't know -- I'll never know -- if Anne liked the song, but she appreciated the effort.
There have, over the years, been many iterations of the song. One of them even ended up on an album by The Milner Brothers - a result of my playing it for Scott Milner on a camping trip. The current version is in the video above. The first verse is, almost word for word, the first verse and chorus that I sang for Anne almost 35 years ago.
And it's the title track of the album for no better reason than the fact that I think it's a great title for an album.
"Music No One Else Can Hear"
Song by: Marc Whinston
Lead vocal by Toby Wilson
All instruments and backing vocals by Toby Wilson
Arranged and Produced by Toby Wilson for Tobias Wilson Music, Ltd.
________________________________________
*More accurately, I was writing lyrics. I still didn't feel that I could set anything to music.
**Tony's Luncheonette, a small hangout spot next door to the school.
***Unimportant detail: in the walkman was a copy of the Dave Edmunds album, D.E.7th
No comments:
Post a Comment