A virtual friend of mine in the US is my favorite songwriter who is at least as obscure I am. He writes some lovely stuff. On one of the musician sites were we hang out, this fella mounted a songwriting challenge: write a song around the words "who knew".
Now I've learned to pay attention when he does that because a couple of my favorite tunes I've written in recent years stem from one of his challenges. So in late November 2015 I came across his post and thought, OK, I'll have at it. Before I could get to it, I was over on Facebook where a couple of morons were having one of those typical idiotic debates on the general female attractiveness of Alison Krauss. Now who cares if she looks like a slug if she still does what she does!
Anyway, one of the morons said, "her eyes are too little and beady and her nose is too big". (Like HE's some kind of Adonis.) Well, my brain, wrapping around that bit of pettiness, went something like "OK, her eyes are too beady, too large is her snoot - big deal!" Then it smacked me across the chops that I had a song first line, and maybe I could work it into something for the "Who Knew?" challenge.
I wanted to include some of the characteristics of many of this fellow Gregs's songs: romance and humor (the man wrote a romantic song about plucking a chicken - and made it work!), and for some reason Las Cruces, New Mexico (his "The Rose of Las Cruces" is about a 300-pound apron-wearing lover of banjo playing men... you gotta hear it to get it.) Anyway, once I got going, the song fell out in about 30 minutes.
Song art photo: flickr/debaird
(Creative Commons license)
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