About My Influences

"Inspiration comes to the poet through the mundane everyday things."

"The words of the prophets were written on the studio walls, concert halls." Thus says Neil Peart's paraphrase of Paul Simon's lyric in "Limelight." The original line from "The Sound of Silence" says "subway walls." I like this better, because inspiration comes to the poet through the mundane everyday things. On the subway. At the gym. In the library. The poet can see visions of angels and demons here. Here good and evil do battle. Here the lonesome country cowboy rides. The poet then chooses words, crafts sentences, and constructs rhymes that are pleasing to the ear. Sometimes he can't interpret them yet, but the interpretation will come, maybe not to him, but to others, his readers.

The poet and philosopher John Lennon (and he was a damn good one) once said that all songs are what you make of them after they're composed, they're given meaning by the interpreters that follow. I think he's on to something. In the case of Wordsworth and the daffodils, unless we can resurrect Wordsworth from the grave and ask him about the meaning of the daffodils, it's possible that Wordsworth was simply sitting in a lovely field, describing the scenery. Maybe the daffodils have no meaning, only what later interpreters have ascribed to it.

When I wrote Spectre At The Castle, I simply sought to find words that sounded pleasing to the ear. I even wrote the line "Castles in the sand and water in a half an hour," by inputting the word "Castles" in to my phone and using the auto-suggest feature. It means nothing. It's a random string of words. Now, I rhymed it with, "It sit in fear, with demons near, I tremble and I cower," it took on meaning in context, but it's nothing more than randomly generated words. This is poetry. Now my poem has evolved and since taken on meaning, but it started out with a 14 syllable pattern which I copied from a Yes song and a bunch of nonsense lyrics about demons and castles.

When I started writing it was 2010, I had no idea what I was doing. I have 3 notebooks full of absolute crap. But I continued writing, and I continued learning from the masters. Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen. The prophets. The wordsmiths. The Shakespeares of their day. And one day I wrote something good. And then the words just came pouring forth and the music too. My songs are constantly evolving, never finished. I've spent many a line trying to emulate the verbose, character-laden style of Bob Dylan who, to me, was the greatest master of his craft. I take songs that I enjoy, write new lyrics to them, and then write a new tune based on those lyrics, and thus I have a totally original song in the style of the master.