2016
A Single Tear
A ballad about all the things two people do not say to each other, and how a single tear can end up carrying all of it. The restraint is what makes it hit.
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Songs Published in 2016
26 songs
2016
I Will Follow
A blues-rock song that builds from a quiet minor verse to a fuller declaration. The melody climbs and doesn't fully resolve.
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2016
Well, Well, Well
A song about holding steady while someone volatile threatens to leave again. Its shrugging refrain suggests the narrator has heard all this before.
Found On This Album
2016
Home Again
A searching ballad about a long road traveled and a mountain that's always there in the mind. The lyric doesn't sentimentalize — "broken people, bodies, hearts and minds" is in there — but it finds a resting...
Rough Working Demo
2016
Song for David
A tender song of absence and longing, carried by the feeling that memory can make the whole world echo with one missing person. Its sadness is direct but never heavy-handed, more ache than despair.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Caroline
A summer-memory song held at a slight, wistful distance. It lingers over warmth, touch, and the way certain seasons stay suspended in the mind.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Creature Discomfort
A darkly comic song about media saturation, public cruelty, and the warped creature that collective fear can summon. The tone is satirical, but the unease underneath it is real.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Promises
A weary desert song about promises of deliverance that never quite arrive. Drawing on images of wandering, punishment, and the elusive land of milk and honey, it turns sacred language into a human story of...
Rough Working Demo
2016
Comes the Flood
A slow, searching song about damage that may already be beyond repair. Its repeated refrain makes the recognition feel heavier each time it returns.
Rough Working Demo
2016
It's Over
A bleak, matter-of-fact song about waking up to the feeling that something fundamental has already been lost. It is less melodrama than recognition, with humor used only to make the truth bearable.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Spillway
A quiet philosophical song about being carried in the flow of time and existence — neither controlling it nor resisting it. The imagery is hydraulic throughout: tide, overflow, swept away.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Trump Fucked Blues
A traditional blues song using the extended metaphor of something rotten brought into the house. The argument stays in the household image all the way through — the smell, the rot, the wood beginning to...
Rough Working Demo
2016
Undiscovered Country
A folk song built on Hamlet's phrase — the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns — and tracking decline through seasons of the soul. Eight verses, each ending on a different tag. Long,...
Rough Working Demo
2016
Wish I Could
A folk-blues built on a single repeated wish that changes from verse to verse: lay down this load, walk the golden road, see the emerald valley, hear the silver bell toll. Five verses, one song.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Bump and Scrape
A philosophical song, about the sparks and friction of human experience. The first verse is physical, the second cosmic, the third reflective. The bridge is instrumental. The closing verse is the most honest:...
Rough Working Demo
2016
Dear Comrade
A political song addressed to working people and the ways they are taught to misread their own hardship. Its argument is blunt because the stakes are.
Rough Working Demo
Video
2016
Gawain's Night
A winter solstice song, drawing on the Arthurian legend of the Green Knight. The green man represents the necessity of darkness before light, and the narrator integrates the lesson: wearing a bit of green as a...
Rough Working Demo
2016
Way Deep
A song about a friendship too old and deep to explain. It trusts the bond more than the conscious mind that tries to name it.
Rough Working Demo
2016
The Man is Back in Town
A plainspoken political song, with a gallery of characters each responding differently to a new authoritarian presence. Jethro Bodine, Jihadi Jack, Martha Sue, the corner guy — each verse inhabits a type...
Rough Working Demo
2016
Blue in Bluegrass
A playful bluegrass song about adding blues sensibility to the genre. The argument is in the metaphors: "like moonshine booze," "it smokes clean and smooth." The whole thing is cheerful and undemanding, with...