TOPIC: Reaching to connect with a sibling

My Sister Amy - I jumped off this dock without a life preserver and she jumped in after me 

What follows is the story of me and my sister. Of all the songs I perform live in concert, these two "Sister Songs"--a matched set--are the most frequently requested. When I play the first song, half the room tears up. When I play the second song, the other half of the room gets all watery-eyed. (The non-teary people know better than to come to my concerts, I guess). Each of us, it seems, can relate in some way to one side or the other of this equation: siblings who grow apart--and one who maybe struggles with it more than the other.

GROWING APART
When we were young, Amy and I shared a room, a bunk bed, and many late night conversations, giggling and doing imitations of the voices (and imagined gastrointestinal releases) of all of our neighbors. We had secret glances and little pieces of shorthand. Everything she did, I wanted to do. But when we grew up, Amy and I grew into different lives. And we grew apart. She seemed okay with it. I spent a lot of years, when I stopped to think about it, feeling somewhat tortured by our apartness. I came up with no end of stories, explanations, reasons, justifications, and excuses for what it all meant. On the surface, I am not sure what it looked like, but inside of me, down below the surface where no one could see, there were a lot of approaches, and a lot of retreats. I was hurting, and I didn't know where to go with that hurt, or how to give it a voice. 

A SONG FOR ALL MOMS
I l-o-v-e to crank this song at top volume and feel it course through my veins.

I think this song is one of my proudest accomplishments.

Which is funny because I didn't even do all the work!

This song comes from someplace else, and I can sense my connection to that place, every time I play it. 

This song is dedicated to You, if you are a mom. To your Mom if you have one (everybody does!) It is also dedicated to my own mom. And, most importantly, it is dedicated to Erika Whitmore Godwin and Susan Godwin who collaborated together with me across the spans of time and, well...consciousness...to bring this song to you. 

TOPIC: ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and LOVE
A Father With ALS Offers Up a Song to Leave Behind for his Daughter

A SONG WIH A LIFE OF ITS OWN

WOW! This month's featured commission is one of those rare and wonderful stories where a song takes on a vector and velocity that far exceeds anything I could have wished or imagined for it! The heart of this story is Andy and his daughter Rachel. But the fireworks around the song are really quite incredible! To wit: as I write this, I am days away from performing this song, in a private concert, for the entire Board of Directors of The ALS Association. And I am just two weeks away from being flown to Washington DC (being put up at the Plaza!) to perform this song before a crowd of upwards of a thousand people at the ALS Association's National Public Policy Conference. The evening's agenda? Two US Senators receiving awards and...little old ME!  But the heart of this story is not about private concerts or Boards of Directors or Senators or crowds of thousands. The heart of this story is Andy, and ALS, a strikingly debilitating disease, and Rachel, Andy's teenaged daughter, and love. Love is definitely the star of the show. Read on to learn just how much heart there is in this story. And see to what far and fantastic corners, when it is deep and real, love can reach.

(Brace yourself--this write-up is an extensive one, whch perhaps underscores how much this experience has touched me.)

TOPIC: Birthday for cancer survivor

TOPIC: WELCOME NEW BABY!

THE STORY
Sandy came to me wanting a song that would serve as both a lullaby and a welcoming greeting to her new grandson Jonah. There were two unique challenges in creating this song: (1) Sandy (humbly, I think) requested that the song be from her but not use the word “I” (pretty much all of my songs, you might note, are written in the First Person because I believe that gives them the most intimacy—so this was new territory for me). And (2) this song was to acknowledge the fact that Sandy’s husband Lew had passed away and would not be present to greet Jonah, but this was to be done in such a way that this fact would not be overly obvious nor made an “issue” of in the song. 

Many of you may remember this story because it was so unusual and incredible: a father dying of Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) who could no longer speak, commissioned a song for his young daughter. The CEO of the ALS Associoation heard the song and had me perform it live for his Board of Directors and then flew me to Washington DC to perform it for the larget-ever gathering of ALS pateints and their families. 

Two years later, the girl for whom this song was commissioned, now a teenager, has comissioned a response song for her father. He is now completely immobile and kept alive by respirator. Her song, and her fahter's original song to her, are both here in music-video format, and below that you can see me interviewed on TV about the intense journey I made with this family on these two songs.

TOPIC: Mother to grown children

TOPIC: A Husband and Wife Create a Song With Anna to Mark Their Wedding Anniversary

TOPIC: Grown daughter to father