For the Record
"Every Morning"
by Peter Mayer

I was in Florida; in Tampa, to be exact, with Jimmy Buffett on a tour... it must have been four or five years ago. Tour time is a time when I can make my own routines, day by day, being away from all the duties and craziness of home.

I still have to deal with business of course, and stuff that’s not fun, but there is more discretionary time when I can get into a book, write, and exercise or play my guitar. I had made a change from my previous habit of getting up, reaching for the nearest, fullest bowl of oatmeal, a cup of green tea and a bagel (the carbo police eventually caught up with me). I had started to roll out of bed and grab my guitar first thing, just to see what would come out.

At that time of day, your creative spirit, your mind, is not clouded and distracted as it is after you receive a phone call or two, chase three maids from your room, and head off to your daily duties. One of my favorite poets, William Stafford, used to get up at 4:30 every morning, and write for three or four hours. It was his quiet time of the day where he felt the presence of the muse. He wrote every single day like that for years, and when asked how he managed to be so prolific, he said, “you would be too if you just lower your standards.”

Morning automatically lowers my “standards.” It is the time when my judge and jury are still sleeping, and my hands just go to the guitar and play, and I don’t worry about what it is. It just is.

So, on this particular morning, I started fooling around with a little guitar exercise that consisted of moving lines with a walking bass note, and it sounded interesting to me when I sang the same line as a vocal melody with it. I made a demo of it that morning on my computer as I often do, just mouthing any lyrics that came to mind.

Those “placeholders” often help the kind of words and directions that come later. Eventually, it took on the title Every Morning. I wanted an easy feel from the group for the song, it’s almost a bossa nova. Jeff Taylor played some magnificent accordion to open it up. The lyric bits and pieces came together from different places.

Ray Bradbury, the fabulous science fiction writer, has a great book on writing called Zen in the Art of Writing. Talking about the creative process, he said, “every morning I get out of bed and step on a landmine. I spend the rest of my day putting myself back together.”

That kind of became the theme for the whole song. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to get up and do it again and hopefully make the best of it, until one day you don’t... but that’s a subject for another song.

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