Gruverider, Bumperboy, Al-David, and Tommyad,

Thanks for listening. And thanks for the kind words. Here's some more on the back story on this tune.

The director of the Wilson Pregnancy Center and I were talking one day and she expressed to me how difficult it was for them to find and legally license music for their projects and fundraising.

I offered to try to write something for them, no obligation on their part. If they liked it fine, if not, hey no biggie, at least we tried.

I contacted my co-writer and presented the idea and so we started to write based on a title/idea (In the eyes of a child) and that was kinda moving along nicely, but really not saying anything new or important, actually going nowhere fast. She pointed out there were other songs with that or a similar title, so we abandoned the project, which had a few good lines. Out the door, into the trash. Delete, gone.

And we started again, fresh, kicking around some ideas, this song came as a result.

You will often hear me talk about rewriting and changing things around and deleting and reworking structure in a song. When I say these things to other writers, it's because I know that they work as part of the process to get the song to be the best it can be. It's not me simply being critical of someone's work. This song, for example, was bounced back and forth between my co-writer and I, somewhere around 6 to 8 times. Each time it bounced, there was something changed in the song. It might have been one word or it may have been us deleting an entire verse and starting again by writing something totally new. We were still making changes on the fly to the lyrics as I was recording this song with Cassie and Sydney.

The point I'm trying to get across here is, don't be afraid to make changes, even big changes, to a song that you are working on. To me, in the writing process, nothing is sacred. Nothing is too good not to be changed to something else if the song calls for it to be changed. Its with rare exception that I insist on keeping certain lines. In one song in particular, my co-writer wanted to dump one line, I insisted we keep it. Later, when people listened, that one line kept coming up in commentary as the line that they particularly liked and remembered.

Every now and then, a song rolls out that is exceptionally pleasing. Between the music, the melody and the lyric, and this, to me, was one of those songs.... but it certainly did not come to be this way easily. It took work and willingness to throw out good ideas, and good lines of lyric in exchange for better ones.

My co-writer cried when she heard the studio version with Cassie. Same story when Cassie played it for her family and friends. In the end, the WPC loved it and we did in fact license this song to them at not cost for them to use in their fundraising and other activities.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.