3 minute version of the story of my life up until that point...
The nostalgia of looking back at the days when I was still free to roam about like a gypsy, compared to the settled down life-style I saw myself stuck in... But there are always some lessons to learn from all of it...
Nov.6-13, 1994
MP3 Lyrics
Written on March 4, 1989. We were living in a Christian commune in a small town in Switzerland, and I was sick, reading some news clips about Near Death Experiences, some of which evidently had quite an impact on me, so I sat up, grabbed my guitar and wrote down this song as if it had been dictated to me...
MP3 LyricsI remember starting to write this one back in Mendoza, in front of the "Bodega del 900," there I was booked to play a few times on my own, after "Silver Lining" broke up. It was probably one of the first songs I got in which it's Jesus Who's speaking to the listener... I've since learned to accept it as part of my mission in life to get people to listen up to "What Jesus has to Say."
MP3 LyricsWell, to make a long story short, Shalom was already taken, and so eventually I left that little Gypsy caravan and moved in with a small Christian commune in the Spanish town of Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol. My former busking partner Phil and I had tried without any success to find some places to play there, so I was pretty desperate the first night I went out, trying to contribute my share for the rent of my new home. Remember that verse, "Prove Me now, if I will not open the windows of Heaven and pour forth such a blessing that there will not be room enough to hold it?" Well, that's how it was. At the end of the night, my pockets were nearly bursting with cash, and I brought home 15 times the amount that I needed.
There is a God, and He loves me.
His second sign to show me that was Judith, a girl about my age I met one night in one of the bars where I played, and that I also wound up falling head over heels in love with (sort of a chronic disease at age 17...), and for whom I wrote this song. She didn't heed the call, though, and so I continued following Jesus as a single a few months later...
The oldest song that's available in a half-way decent recording on one of my mostly homegrown productions is this tune based on a lick in a G-Tuning (both E bass and A strings to G) I was shown by the piano player of the first band I ever played in at the age of 13. I was by far the youngest member of the band, and the front man was twice my age. In 1980, at the age of 17 I was traveling through Spain with an American fellow musician and his wife, and working on a melody to accompany that lick, and some lyrics to it. At first I tried to interpret it as a love song for a girl (I was badly in love with a girl named Shalom at that time), but later realized that no one fit that perfect description, except Jesus, or God Himself, so I added the last verse to make it clear that this was a love song dedicated to the living God.
