Each Shade and Hue

I wrote this song as a modern-day message to and for prodigals. W e all know them (or are one). Whether it is a child who made the decision to walk away from the way we raised them, a friend or family member who walked away, or even if it is just we, ourselves, going through a season we are not at our spiritual best: where there is still life, there is more often than not, still hope. Most people are at least semi-familiar with the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. If you are not, go give it a read. He did what Esau did in the Old Testament: sold his soul for a bowl of soup, so to speak. The foc u s was not just that he was foolish, focused on on all the wrong things, and had a really bad attit u de. It was that he was willing to take from people who tr u ly cared abo u t him, abandon them, and waste it on people who did not care if he lived or died. He wanted to live by what was admired by worldly standards and do things his way witho u t all the bothersome bo u ndaries. And as i...

T his song is a very unusual one for me, in that it did not come together in a way I typically write songs. I wrote the music in early spring of 2013. I have the audio file I recorded into my phone,  music intact, exactly as the song sounds today. At the time, I had no specific theme in mind, so I did what I always did: filled in the lines with "dummy" words (whatever popped into my head). That helped set the meter and the syllables for me to work with later. I never had a chance to do anything more with the song before I suffered a hemorrhagic stroke where I was not given much chance of living. In 2016, I located the audio file Kim had saved from my phone. It was simply labeled, "Because of You." That was a line I had used as a filler line for the tune when I recorded in 2013. Other lines I had used actually remained in the finished song, because they no longer seemed like just "dummy words." Some were frighteningly prophetic in nature. The stroke would h...

M y father-in-law, as my mother-in-law often says, was not a safety-conscious man. My wife has told me enough near-death stories to make me agree. Many of them were water related, since he loved to fish, and they spent a lot of time on the lakes. One of my wife's stories involved her being jerked off a rubber raft right before it went over a small waterfall Bob was fishing over. (He took great joy in the fact not one piece of bait spilled.) One of his other antics brought a Bible story to life. In this version, it was he and two of his brothers on Lake Erie in a boat that was definitely not designed for large waves. His brother Ron said the waves were close to 10 feet tall, and it being the first week of December (!?), there was no one around to help if things went awry. (Which they did.) The waves were taller than the boat, and the only choice they had was to drive straight into the waves at full throttle, hoping the boat cleared the peak. They managed to all get to shore and surv...

I guess I might stand as the poster child for this song. I wrote this a LONG time ago. Every time we are working on these songs, we are amazed at how prophetic they are of what we would be going through in the years ahead. The guy who found me collapsed after I had a stroke was the manager of the Dunkin Donut where I would grab my morning coffee on the way to work. I was not even supposed to be driving that morning (I usually walked the few miles there for the workout), but we were going on an anniversary trip in a few hours. I had some paperwork that needed done, so I drove to get it over with quicker. I felt my side going numb and knew something was not right, so I pulled into the familiar parking lot and I had enough sense to open the door so I could collapse outside the car. Who knows how long I would have been there otherwise? The manager knew me, as we talked a lot through the years. He realized I was on the ground and got help. His good friend was the first responder, and he t...