ONLY MY FAMILY KNOWS that I’ve written songs since I was a kid in junior high school. Not notes on paper, but songs sung and played, mostly on a guitar or acapella. The songs have been mainly fun and funny tunes along with a fair number of Gospel songs.
This coming Friday, the world gets the hardest song I’ve written.
It drops to Spotify, Amazon and the rest of the world. Perhaps, it will dissolve into the sea of new songs released that day, never finding a place in anyone’s heart but mine.
When you write a song about something you loved and lost, it hurts.
- crying kind of hurt.
- yelling at God kind of hurt.
- lingering anger kind of hurt.
Song about a dog
This is all about how a dog broke my heart.
Crying over a dog. The perfect Country song.
Oddly, I didn’t cry this hard or hurt this long when Dad died, or my younger brothers, or my wife’s dad. And I loved them all. I’d take back the life of any one of them over a dog.
So why grieve more over the dog and less over your own dad and brothers?
Well, I didn’t kill my dad or my brothers. But I had to kill Buddy, our rescued Black Lab.
“Euthanize” is the clinical term. “End their suffering.”
But by ending them?
When you tell the vet “okay” and your dog dies an instant later, all you can feel is that you killed your most trusting and devoted friend. And in my case, he was looking into my eyes when his eyes rolled back in death.
I still think of a profane word every time I see that in my head. My eyes well up, too. Like they’re doing now.
I’m still struggling with God about why I had to do that.
I wrote two songs as I tried to work through the pain I felt.
- “I Never Wanted a Dog.” That’s the one that releases Friday.
- “I Know You’re Angry,” is me imagining what God might say to me, knowing how angry I was. I won’t release that for a while, but you can hear it in Psalm 13 in The Casual English Bible®.
If you’ve loved a dog and had to endure the trauma of sending the dog or any loved pet to the Creator, I hope the song will give you a few moments to reflect on how grateful we are for the time we have with what feels like our extra children.
I know that a song about a dog doesn’t seem like a big deal. I get it.
But this one is personal and a very big deal to me. It’s my heart out there, in a song not written for anyone but me. But what happened next is why I’m sharing it.
AI performs the song
Though I wrote the lyrics and provided a recorded version of the song, Artificial Intelligence produced the song: creating the arrangement, enhancing the melody, and providing instruments with vocals.
I talked with a professional musician who complained that AI is cheating and that it doesn’t have a soul.
Listen to the song and see if it doesn’t leave you feeling that at the very least, the people who programmed the software have souls.
The first time I heard what AI did to my melody and my lyrics—heartfelt words that expressed my broken heart—I was sitting at my desk in my home office. My wife stood beside me, listening with me. By the end of the song I was weeping, with shoulders leaping.
I hope it moves you, too.
AI might be heartless and soulless, but it can sing a song that warms the heart and touches the soul. Mine if no one else’s.
Songs also releasing: Down at the Green Shack
I’m also releasing two versions of a playful song I wrote and have been singing to my five grandkids for several years.
Down at the Green Shack (Gal version). This is the Go-to.
Down at the Green Shack (Guy version). I sing this one. “Writer seeks kindness and white lies.”
Music videos
I’ve got YouTube videos ready for each song, but I can’t premiere them until Friday. The premiere links will be on my YouTube channel. I’ll also revise this blog on Friday, and add direct links to the videos.
- I Never Wanted a Dog video will premiere at 11 am Central Time on Friday.
- Both releases of Down at the Green Shack will premiere at 1 pm Central Time on Friday.
Pre-save songs to auto-add to your library
This one link for each song, below, takes you to your favorite streaming service—Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and more—and if you pre-save on Spotify, the songs will automatically drop into your library the moment they’re live.
- Down at the Green Shack (Gal Vocalist) Recorded the hard way, with humans.
- Lord, I’ve Seen the Great I Am (Psalm 104) Coming September 26
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