I’m not one to talk if I don’t have anything to say. I’ve been writing, over the past few years, but not publishing as much. There are times for talking and there are times for listening. I guess I’ve been in a phase of the latter.

I recognized, recently, (because it’s such a metaphor for so many things) that it’s been more than a hundred years since the sinking of the Titanic. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to try to write a song from the perspective of one of the musicians who played on that voyage. They were famously heard playing, from the lifeboats, even as the ship was sinking.

Truth is, the song I have written is not really about the musicians on the deck of the Titanic. It’s about my own feeling that my personal “musical ship” has been going down, for some time now. I know I’m not alone in expressing that a music career is a hard thing to sustain.

As I “imagined” being one of those fateful musicians who played as the ship was sinking, I learned that, for myself, the central question became; “Who am I playing this for?” And I knew, in no uncertain terms, that fundamentally those players must have been playing for themselves.

 

It struck me that that is the most important reason to continue to make music.

 

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