(A Few) Songs!

Crocodile (Full-length Version)
Why are the animals here, all the myriad shapes, styles, talents, skills, appearances that surrround us? What do they show us? Maybe they hold a mirror to ourselves??

Show Me (Shortened Version)
One of those “relationship” inspired ejaculations. Self-explanatory. Was thinking of Son House when conceiving this one, as far as musical style and feel.

Going on Vacation (Shortened Version)
Nominally about going on vacation, but also a nostalgic look back to a time in our country when the middle class prospered, and families for the first time had the wherewithal to take low-cost vacations. Note the references to “getting film” and “see the USA” (some listeneres may remember the Chevrolet slogan), only this USA was the “land of the working man.”


I Never Knew
(Shortened Version)
Sometimes you only know how you really felt when you look back, or you could say, when it’s too late.

Who Pulled the Trigger
This one references the horrible event that preceded Christmas a couple of years ago in Newtown, Connecticut. There was the twisted irony of some parents having to pick out a tombstone for thier child’s remains, while others, with the profits from the sales of the equipment, enjoyed buying seasonal gifts and indulgences for their children. The song simply asks a question of the listener.


I Needed You (Shortened Version)
A sweet (I think–I hope you do also) eight-bar blues, using the 12-string guitar and the slide resonator, also incorporating some of my favorite turn arounds and rhythmic figures.


Stop this Killing
(Shortened Version)
There are many ways to kill, to lie, and to steal; when they become the prevailing zeitgeist of a nation, the quality of life, at the deepest levels, degenerates; and that nation is on the path to perdition.


You
Rescued Me (Shortened Version)
Written for someone who has a special place special in one’s heart, and  though flown in spirit, will live there always.


Long Black Cloud
(Shortened Version)
An ordinary “day in the neighborhood”, ala Mr. Rogers (rest his gentle soul), is  not such for someone with a musician’s nervous system, which is super sensitized to surrounding stimuli from which the average person feels little or no effect: Not an easy path to tread–Save a little love for the musician or artist in your life, for he carries a burden of which that most people are blissfully unaware.


Guiding Light
(Shortened Version)
Begun and set aside for 12 years, then finished in Asheville, NC, during  a cold winter in a single-wide, watching frosty breath float towards the ceiling and across the room. In the midst of the daily madness that constitutes our modern lives, I find it comforting, like a soothing balm, to recite this one to myself as a poem.

All songs © D. Amarante