Starting to write a song is sometimes as easy as taking a cliche and twisting a word or two. (Of course, starting a song is easy. Finishing it is another matter, but that’s best left to a future entry.)
While driving to work a year or two back, a song containing the phrase, “Jack of all trades, master of none” came on the radio. Seemed a little trite to me, and then I thought, “Jack of all trades…geez…I wish I could just MASTER one”.
Then I took out my notebook.
I listed some of the things I’ve done over the years to make a living, remembering how I went to college “part-time forever”, and how I stressed over what I would do for a living. In my twenties, it seemed like an eternity. Twenty years later, I don’t care that much anymore. I just want to write and do whatever it takes in the meantime to pay the bills.
One interesting thing I do have under my belt was being a freelance “stringer” for Jay Leno back in the late 80s.
My song Jack of All Trades includes the line “I even wrote for Jay Leno one time”. (It was more than “one time”, but this worked out as a better rhyme.) Every week I’d fax in a page of jokes. Over the course of a year or two, four jokes made it onto the air. I dug through the archives (my desk) yesterday, and found a “cassette tape” (remember those?) containing the audio from two of the bits that made it onto the air:
It was pretty incredible hearing something that you wrote actually make it out onto network television. It was also a nice nod getting one of these in the mail a few days later:
