My Music: MY WINDOW and AWAKEN

Driveway side of our Pluckemin house, 1978

Two short tracks I decided to run together, the first is but 38 seconds, My Window. A fragment, really, but I liked it well enough to record it in 1977, adding bird sounds from an album of natural sounds, I don’t recall which one. It was probably written in the spring of 1969 when I was a senior in high school. The top window in the photo above (taken in winter) is the one I wrote about.

My room, over the garage, was my refuge, where I read, wrote, drew, and dreamed. My two younger brothers always shared a room, I had this one to myself. I was interested in birds, I already had my first binoculars, and we had a window bird feeder in the living room. On my walks in the woods I would keep a list of the bird species I saw each time. It was always a short list, just the ones I could identify from a paperback field guide by Roger Tory Peterson, but I had fun with it. The guitar part is again very simple, four notes on the two top strings. My vocal sounds very young to me now, more than 45 years later.

Awaken has lyrics that were part of a longer song written in 1972, but one of many where I had forgotten the chords and melody. Writing actual music was a struggle I rarely took on, I would usually just write the lyrics in my notebooks, sometimes with chords, but often not even that. If I forgot how they went, I figured they weren’t memorable enough to keep anyway. The guitar for it is played backwards, me experimenting when I recorded the song probably in 1977, it sounds like an organ. I also added bird sounds here probably from the same album, so the two tracks kind of fit together in that way. As for meaning, it was probably influenced by the writing of George MacDonald, though there isn’t much to it.

Longer and more complex songs are coming soon. My Window and Awaken are © Todd Klein, all rights reserved.

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