It is a small world after all is said and done.

Yeah. That never would have made a good lyric, but contract a few words, discard the ending, and you've got the title of one of the most maligned verse/chorus songs of all time.

I was on that ride on Wednesday. Much to the immediate displeasure of Calvin, who whined and complained all through the line and then closed his eyes and covered his ears as we made that joyously air-conditioned boat ride through pure gleeish schmaltz.

Disneyland is no place for children.

At least my children.

I've had an easier time getting him to eat broccoli then I did making have fun at Disneyland.

Next vacation will be an asparagus festival.

But as we rounded the second or third bend, I stopped being frustrated and turned my thought towards the music. At first I found it fascinating that each section was almost seamlessly integrated between the sections. It occurred to me that each section had a different recording of the same song, in the same key, at the same tempo and yet they were all vastly different stylistically and as you passed from village to mountainside, each recording flowed into the next.

How much equipment was needed in the sixties to make that possible? Remember this was an era where the Beatle could record an entire album with just four tracks.

And then I started to listen to the craft of the song. How perfectly clever they were. Not a lyrical line missed or extended. The melody flowed perfectly. How the second part of the verse makes a perfect little dance around the circle of fifths. How the key was selected at exactly the right place for the limited range of a children's choir.

(My biggest pet peeve of children's theatre is how badly keyed it is for children's voices. Twelve year olds should not be doing Sondheim, I don't care how fucking cute "Into the Woods" is.)

I was mesmerized. Fascinated by the craft. I did a quick little google search to see who had written the song and I came across something surprising.

"Its a Small World." was written by the Sherman Brothers. One of the most prolific songwriting teams in movie and television history. Their father Al Sherman was a writer in the Tin Pan Alley days and encouraged them to write.

I won't bore you with their biography. Besides, I was looking at wikipedia and some of it has to be wrong, but it was extensive. And it really got me to thinking about how the day of the pure song writer is over. How the craft slips ever further from substance into style.

Sure we can't replicate those perfect rhymes any longer. They've become cliches. But Rockstars did something to the craft that is irrevocable. They discovered that money is in copyright. And if they didn't write their own songs, they were loosing out.

Teenage angst pays off well.

So sang Kurt Cobain.

Good line. Lame lyric.

And I've said it before. I'd much rather be a master of the craft than a Rockstar.

"Here Lady Gaga, record this, trust me, they'll love it"

I had a conversation once with another songwriter who was talking about vetting offers from a recording company.

"I couldn't take anything less than a million dollars. Anything else wouldn't be enough to risk my job."

To which her boyfriend leaned over and said,

"You're talking to Josh. He would sell a song for a turkey sandwich."

And he's right.

Let me illustrate:

Recently an old boyfriend of my wife's has made it into the tabloids. I won't bother you with his name but lets just say he's a fifty one year old actor who has had a few big successes, and pops up here and there.

Well this fifty one year old actor has just gotten married to a sixteen year old girl.

A sixteen year old girl with a website showcasing her talents as a singer. A pop singer with breast implants and enough auto-tune to correct scoliosis.

And my first thought wasn't "How Obscene!"

My first though was "Yeah, she's gonna need a real songwriter, and I wonder if my wife still has his email somewhere."

Cause I'm a pig. And a bit of a whore.

And I could really use a turkey sandwich right now.

And it turns out that this fifty one year old ex-boyfriend of my wife, has his own production company.

I'm starting to feel a little momentum.

I know a girl, who knows a guy, who married a girl, who will never be a pop star, but obviously has some money, and could open the kind of doors that lead to real pop stars. The kind of pop stars that have no problem paying for a song with a turkey sandwich.

Notice how I didn't wake my wife up at this point to show her the news.

I wanted to get a little deeper into the story.

On further review of the You Tube videos I recognized a canned drum beat from GarageBand.

Wait, I said. This wasn't a money production. This was someone trying to break out of the porn industry with a three year old MacBook Pro, and a 16 year old girl.

And then I raced to the website of the production company.

Maybe there's some money there.

It's mission statement: "To let artists dream . . . "

Ouch.

And it got worse.

Current projects included (I shit you not) a series of children's books based on the adventures of his chihuahua.

So there's no real opportunity. Even when the songwriter knows a girl, who knows a guy, who has probably reached the tail end of his fame with a slapdash marriage to a sixteen year old girl at a Vegas hot spot.

I wish them love and luck all the same.

And as I clicked out of all the different websites and was about to clean my browser, I saw a little picture of Ringo Starr and the bottom of one of the articles.

A connection to Ringo Starr singing one of his first hits after the break up of the Beatles.

"You're 16."

If you're unfamiliar with the tune, do as I did, look it up on you Tube. It contains the lyric "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, and You're Mine."

And there's three points I'd like to make about the song "You're 16."

First, it was a hit by several singers going back to the sixties. Which kind of solidifies the fascination that famous grown men have for girls at that age. (I find them mostly vapid, but I'm not famous)

Second, Ringo Starr's recording of the song is actually the only hit song in recorded history to feature a Kazoo solo.

And Lastly,

you guessed it,

It was written by the Sherman Brothers.

Man in Transition

I stare at the face in the mirror. The one everyone else sees, but I can only glance at. The skin once smooth now creased with a million smiles and a thousand furrowed brows. There is very little boy left in that face. The boy exists now only in the gleam of the eyes and the tilt of the head.

This man is still as angry as the boy. Still as confused. Still burning with the fury he felt ten twenty years ago. Still as insulted by cruelty and injustice. Still yearning for peace. Still embarrassed by his clumsiness, his awkwardness, his narcissism, his laziness, his procrastination, his unmet potential.

The man dreams the same dreams as the boy.

He still fears the same fears.

He still doesn't like dogs.

But there are dogs he likes.

He wonders as he stares at this face if the face is the only thing that separates the man from the boy.

Is the only difference between that face and this face time?

Hmm?

His wife says the man is much sexier than the boy.

He tells her to prove it.

But she's tired.

The girl is a woman. And a woman needs rest.

But the man is better than the boy. He's not as fast. He's not as strong. But he's quicker with a joke. He's better with a song or with a tale. He can look a girl in the eyes and tell her what's on his mind. And he knows exactly when that's not appropriate.

He doesn't panic as much as the boy.

He's been places and done things. What once was daunting, is now common place. What once was impossible is now muscle memory.

And the man knows who he is. What he has become. If given a choice, the man knows who the boy would want to grow up to be.

Because he grew up to be the man.

Yet I stare at my face in the mirror with shock and horror.

Rather than with pleasure and grace.

Because the boy wasn't ready to be the man.

And then I pick up my guitar and realize I can't even play like the boy used to play. And when I sing I can't sing like the boy used to sing. And when I joke I am taken seriously. And when I speak people become solemn.

But then I look across the room.

I see that the baby is no longer a baby.

The baby is now a boy.

And the boy will never become a man.

If he has a boy for a father.

So I pick up my guitar again and realize I can still play like the boy. But better. And when I sing, even if I don't have as many notes, each note has depth. And when I joke, people laugh, unless they're still boys and girls and then they probably didn't get the reference in the first place and it makes more sense to hang out with people who do. And when I speak, people become solemn, not because of my age, but because the man exudes a power that the boy could only dream of.

And I still have the boy's dreams.

Which keep me alive.

And I still have the boy's fears.

Which give me ambition.

And I still have the boy's eyes.

Which can send a message of love across a crowded room.

As I have been writing. The baby became a boy. The boy became a man.

And the girl became a woman becoming tired.

May She Forever Let Me Know

I'm a damn good teacher.

Its why I have the job that I have. I might not be the best employee in the world. I might be a little too open about the mistakes I make, too honest about how I feel about things, but I can command a room, get people to listen to me, and have them walk away feeling as if their time was well spent. I can make a paradigm shift seem like a walk in the park, and filter details on a need to know basis.

Its really the only reason my boss likes having me around.

Wasn't something I was born with. But like cooking, its something that I wanted to do and I spared no lack of energy learning how to do it.

For as the saying goes:

Teaching like cooking like making love should be approached with reckless abandon.

Or something like that.

Ask Julia.

So, teaching a class today and my phone buzzed.

I didn't check who it was, I just casually switched the phone off so that it wouldn't buzz again and continued delivering my speech.

Usually when my phone buzzes, its my wife sending me something sweet/funny/dirty/cryptic. Those can wait for a better time.

And there's no better time than when the computers fail and we have to take a ten minute break in order to sort out the glitches.

Which happens all day.

So the computer crashes (damn you PC and your cheap fucked up alternatives to an actual working system), and I check my phone.

Instead of being from my wife, there's a string of texts from my sound engineer wanting to set a date for working on the new album.

OMG. I'm actually gonna start working on music again and the thought fills me with joy. For it has been too long since I've not only worked on the album, but too long since I actually wrote about the musical portion of my life. Its as if the context of my life has strayed from dreams and become mired in reality.

And reality is no place to live.

I'm so excited I reply right away. How about next Tuesday? Five O'clock? The answer is swift, as if he knew Microsoft was going to crash at that exact moment. See you then. And my posture takes on a whole new dimension of confidence.

For I am not a working stiff. I am pre-Rock Star and its time to show everyone in the room that this little training is far beneath my scope of life, yet I am happy to do it as long as it pays the bills. You're not getting the beaten down version of me, you're getting the pomp of a man who has strength and ambition, you're getting a performance of a man in his prime.

The training goes well. I hope they learned. I hope they trust I know what I'm doing. I dream that they could feel my air of confidence and that that air has wafted into their souls and filled them with peace. For I have given them the real me. The me who lives in many worlds.

But the me who lives in many worlds is a farce.

Its scientifically proven that there in no such thing as multitasking. What we think of when we think of multitasking is actually a physically and emotional draining skill of re-prioritisation.

You can't do two things at once.

You can't be two people at once.

You can however switch between the two quickly.

But you blow twice as much energy doing so.

So you can't do it for long.

And eventually, the two things become weak shadows of themselves and nothing is done well.

Artists know this. Which is why in every other aspect of their lives they are complete assholes. You can't be a good Husband/Father/Employee/Artist. You can only be a good artist and shitty at the rest.

I've defied this logic for as long as I can.

but my wife knows better.

Four months ago I showed her the recording schedule I had mapped out for my the new album. She immediately noticed the lines throughout April, May, and June for recording and mixing.

No, she said.

What? I replied.

Those are the months we need to help Taylor find a college, the months where we need to get him settled for graduation. There are parties to plan, weddings to go to, finances to adjust, cleaning to do, a five year old to keep busy.

No, she said.

Why? I asked.



Because I need you.



And so I stalled everything else.

I put my engineer/producer on hold.

I went from writing once a week to every other week.

I etched vacation into every work crevice I could find.

She knows I can't be everywhere. Everyone. And she knows I would have tried. But she didn't want me to try. She wanted me to be there for her, for the family, for this one moment in time when we can relish our triumph of delivering Taylor into the unknown world with the best possible foot in the door.

And I was okay with that. Because when it becomes my time, I know that she will watch my little artistic ship sail and eagerly await my return.

But when I tell her that I will be meeting with my engineer this Tuesday, she looks at me funny.

Damn,

she says.

What?

I ask.

Katie was going to come over for dinner that night.

Oh. I say. No problem, you'll just have to make dinner.

Hmm. She says. Maybe she can come over another night.



Because when it really comes down to it, my boss needs me to teach.

And my wife needs me to cook.

Unless she needs me for something else.

And hopefully,

she will forever let me know.