I'm Not Paid to Write the Lyrics (and a public plea)

Anyone who follows my musical career (by choice, or incidentally), knows that tunesmithing is almost tantalizingly easy for me, but that writing lyrics is an unbelievable drag. I've written words to many songs that I'm pretty happy with, in retrospect (for the most part, songs post-college), but if anyone (outside Gibbs & Sharon) had any idea the extent to which I struggle, painfully, to get my thoughts coalesced into a non-cheesy, lyrical form, you would be amazed that I ever managed to finish anything at all.

The worst part of it is that, especially these days, inspiration is fleeting. The motivation to go down into the basement comes and goes (and is mostly gone). I need to be able to seize those golden moments and hammer the inspiration into reality. What's maddening is that I don't struggle for words at all in almost any other writing endeavor. But it is what it is. Just a bit ago, Sharon gave me a spate of time free to go down into the basement to sit down with pen & paper to come up with some words to got with this new song I'm writing - a song I'm more excited about (the musical basis, and the chorus) than any I've had cooking in recent memory: My Friends, the Brits. But here I am, an hour an a half later, with nothing to show for my time but some frustrated scribbling and my last free daylight hours for at least the next week or two flushed down the toilet. I have enough of an artistic sense to know really, really good words when I see them. And everything I was putting down on paper today was not it.

What to do? I can no longer waste any more time, especially when I am currently riding a wave of motivation to record. I must call on an old friend - my favorite lyricist (right up there with Paul Simon): P. Gibb! I need you! Please, will you write the words for My Friends, the Brits? Just based on the title alone, I think you know where I'm headed with this, but let's connect on the phone and talk it through a bit more (that is, if you think you're up to the task).

The struggling-with-lyrics thing; a significant enough issue in my life that I think a blog is long overdue. The public plea was something I thought I'd do for fun. But I am serious about it. Everyone else can watch this artistic collaboration come together first hand, and maybe even shed a wistful tear (or any kind of tear) thinking about the musical history of Pat & Dan.