Reflections On The Song, 'Dead Body'

This song is a true story except for the ending, which is obviously embellished, since I am still alive. As a chaperone on a European tour for high school musicians, I escaped one morning to the Swiss Alps for a naked hike. When I returned, somebody heard about it and asked me, "Why?" That question stumped me at first. Thinking about it later, I discovered a certain truth in myself: tuning in to my heart's desires sometimes requires turning off the volume of my brain - it's like they have interfering radio wavelengths or something.

Looking back at that time, I treasure that day's nakedness, because in that moment I chose freedom over fear. In the moment, my decision making process skipped over the reasoning and rationalization stages that have too often been debilitating to my spontaneous, eccentric action. That day, I experienced the desire to be naked in the woods, and so I was.

Being naked in the presense of nature is about the most natural experience I can think of. The practice of being natural, to me, means existing freely and effortlessly. It means exercising a freedom from effort, including a freedom from worry, anxiety, and fear. Maybe fear originates in thinking too much, and using the mind to justify doing things, as opposed to relying on other organs (especially the heart).

Maybe the difference between a human being and a human doing is just that the latter requires effort. Streaking in the Swiss Alps did not involve effort or thought or reason; I was a jellyfish floating in the waves. I was being a human being.

An interesting sidenote is that the fear of death actually did come to me during the time while I was streaking. I was running fast downhill, jogging along the steeep, rocky cliff, dodging the jagged overhangs that periodically caught me offguard, losing my footing at certain abrupt corners. I did consider the fact that I was dangerously close to falling off the edge. I was less nervous of humiliation, although I did pass by other hikers on the trail. Still, I ran nakedly, freely, smiley, and when I passed the people heading uphill, they smiled too. We were all smiling, and in fact I was hiking directly on a gigantic smile that graced the face of this mountain.

Writing The Bee Song

I discovered a fun, bouncy, fingerpicking guitar lick one day and wrote the tab to remember it. I played it over and over, listening for a story within its sound. Some months after finding the riff, the inspiration for a story came to me. In the summer of 2007, I learned of the disappearing bees phenomenon. Bee hives were suddenly deserted with no explanation. This troubled me, as a bee admirer. A few months later, a dear friend threw a party for her 50th birthday, and she invited people to gift her with their performances, instead of material gifts. I loooved this idea, and so I went to work, writing "Be Well Bee" as a gift to her. My passion for the bees' well-being translated into a rather epic poem, which became a looong 8-minute folk song.

Because of its length, this song is incredibly exhaustive to perform. Initially, it was like an athletic event testing my vocal cords' endurance. The first few times I made it all the way through, I cried at its climax, both as a result of a physical fatigue and also because I found the story to be so touching, so beautiful. In fact, the first time I performed this song at a paid gig, I cried even in the beginning, and was choked up throughout the entire song. Worst live performance ever, I imagine, but I treasure the experience of being emotionally invested in the spirit of whatever it is that moves me as a vessel through which the Youniverse communicates.

The 'Scuba Diving' Story

"She Opted For Scuba Diving" is actually a first-hand account of a date with a girl. She and I were lying on a hammock during our first night together in September 2008, and I said to her, "Is there anything I can do for you? If I could do anything for you right now, what would you ask for?"

She said, "Take me scuba diving." So I showed her the flippers...and we literally stood on a fence, hand-in-hand, and jumped off (the boat) together. We swam around in the back yard of a strange house and even saw a couple of naked people asleep in a bedroom with the light on – they were our electric eels. We climbed a tree and a car pulled up in the driveway, shining its headlights directly on us for a full minute while we stood in stillness, in the tree, insanely scared, as if swimming in an abyss and looking into the face of a hungry lantern fish.

Sooo romantical. ;)