Hanging Around The Lost and Found

Last year I read Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words and I listened to her records as she talked about them in the book. In her song, "Midnight Cowboy," there's a line that caught my ear.

Quit hangin' around the lost and found

That's a great line! So I started thinking about the other side of that story. What if I wrote something from the perspective of the person who is just hanging around.

I wanted to write a song about my dad who passed away in 2016. I'd also recently listened to Jeff Tweedy's How to Write One Song. I used a writing prompt from that book to put together some words about my dad.

At the end of my dad's life, he was pretty much bound to a chair and on oxygen 24/7. His days were spent sitting in his La-Z-Boy watching daytime television. But he loved it when our family visited. This person who'd lived a vibrant life when he was young and dancing on the side of the road with my mom was now inactive and waiting. We were one of the good things that came around.

This one started with a lot of noodling around with a part until I arrived at something. I have several tracks of humming and playing:

Eventually I came up with the bridge:

And then the song started to come together: