My Songs

One of the things I do is write songs. I have a bunch of them, actually. I have divided my songs into two "albums", one called "Dead Children and Other Stories", and one called "White Trash Blues". Hopefully I will be able to get the lyrics and real audio for all of these online shortly.

Musical influences: Woodie Guthrie. Pete Seeger. Bob Dylan. MP3.com artists Colin Spring and Jeremy Mayle (note: due to recent mp3.com re-organization, I'm scared to try to actually link to these guys, but check them out, they're good). Simon & Garfunkle, Peter Paul & Mary, Harry Chapin. Other musicians I like, but discovered too late for them to be influences: Phil Ochs. Dar Williams (the lady has balls, even if she is a girl :-). Unacknowledged influences from childhood: Johnny Cash. Charlie Pride. Tom T. Hall. Neil Diamond. KWKH-Shreveport (R.I.P.).

Note that while I am a good lyricist, acoustic guitar player, and tunesmith, I am not a singer. Nevertheless I am not afraid to subject people to my nasal warbling, though the reason so many of my songs are in a high key is because at least when I'm doing the high bits, I don't sound like I'm singing out of my right nostril. And finally, I'm not patient enough to do decent post-production on my stuff, so it all sounds like it was recorded on a microcassette recorder then played back into the microphone. Live with it. (And some of these songs were done on really crappy equipment, so laziness was not the factor there, the limits of $10 microphones was :-).

At one time I said "These songs stand by themselves. They don't need explanation". Unfortunately, many of my relatives are, let us say, unsophisticated, and did not understand what they were hearing. So here's the general dope:

• "Dead Children and Other Stories" are what I call my "Houston Songs". Five years passed between the year I spent teaching in an inner city school in Houston, and the first of these songs. It took that long to sort through the experience. These are often angry songs, sad songs, songs about kids who have grown up in hell and the adults for whom they are invisible, songs that were written because nobody gives a damn and nobody ever will. Songs that you won't listen to, no matter how much you say you will, because to truly listen would change your heart and require you to do something besides bleat in satisfied languor. Much better to lie to yourself, and be soothed in your delusions.
• "White Trash Blues" is set in rural North Louisiana and the surrounding grimey industrial cities. These are songs about dreams, hopes, about people trying to make their way through life as best they can knowing full well that they're not going to amount to much. These are songs about trailer parks and rusty cars and rowdy kids who drink too much beer and do stupid things that they regret, about loneliness and striving and everything else that makes people human.
• "The Two Towers" is songs written since September 11, 2001. They may or may not be online at this time. I don't know what to say about these songs that would not be trite.
• All of the above is lies. I don't know what these songs are about. They have no relationship to each other or to events in my life, other than that I observe people and see things that I write about. But people prefer lies to the truth. The truth shall set you free, but it is cold and hard and not very pleasant. Who am I to deprive people of their nice, soothing lies and delusions? Nevertheless, that is what I do here with my songs, and why I must surround them with "explanations" that are not.

Finally: Note that all songs here are Copyright 1995-2003 Eric Lee Green, and may not be reproduced or performed without permission.