John Dandrea

This song was written on the heels of  Rainbow Castle and The Muse Is Sleeping.  Songs of  fantasy were still tumbling out and the first CD collection of songs just spilled into an ever-growing volume.   The lyrics came about from a discussion with my friend after he experienced a major disillusionment over a work situation.  Love this Shutterstock photo!

Technical:  this song used multiple time signature changes and shifts between guitar fingerpicking and strumming parts, delaying completion of recording.  While it was easy to play live on a guitar, getting the recording software to make such changes proved much more difficult for me.

This is one of my favorites.   I love the accurate imagery and vivid memories of a moment frozen in time.  The blue of the dawn, a lady in white who believed she was better off alone... the stuff that any good song ballad is made of, and every word was true.  I'm stunned that Shutterstock had such a photo that so perfectly captured the image that I had for this song.

Technical:  Emily did a beautiful job on the vocal chorus and harmony parts.  The song is a basic ballad of drum kit, guitar, strings, and bass.  This song occupies a very special place in my heart.

This is one of several songs during this time period that started out as poems.  I was not planning to make them into songs, but I found myself  hearing a melody and singing the lyrics so... I simply played the songs on acoustic guitar with the melody that I heard. 

Several of these songs were way overdue for  recording - but finally I got to them and I enjoy hearing them now.  This song and several others including "Eyes" on album #3, were written back to back and it was fun hearing these reach completion.  Enjoy!

Military life is full of special hardships, and perhaps none greater than the feeling of being too far from home and from loved ones.   Overseas assignments are especially difficult, because it's often not feasible to get sufficient time off to fly such distance let alone be able to afford the cost of such travel.  This song is about that feeling - of being unable to see and share in the events and experiences missed, and about that feeling of always being just "too far away" from all the things that seem to matter the most.

This song just tumbled out as a happy-to-sing kind of song, with an easy melody and guitar chords.  It expresses the joy of just being out in a park walking hand in hand with that special someone in your life.

It was a perfect summer day of  being with the one you love, and being thankful for such wonderful companionship.  As time goes on, we often look back at such "perfect moments", and long for that kind of feeling again. 

Tech notes: began with guitar, but in 2019 I replaced the track with the piano ballad of EZKeys and love the new feel of this song.

Rocks in the Road - Steve had written these lyrics, and I was on the bus one day going to work and I suddenly started hearing the melody in my mind, complete with the harmony and chorus part.   It was one of those  rapid-fire kind of moments in song-writing, when the words and music just meshed together perfectly. 

This became one of the songs we played together very often on our 12-strings, and was very popular among our circle of friends.   My latest rendition of this song recording uses the session guitarist picked acoustic instrument plug-in.

This song needs no explanation, as it's dedicated to the one-and-only Barbara Eden, everyone's beloved Genie.  This was the perfect sort of song for me to create to add to this "magical"  collection of special songs - and I was very pleased with how this song turned out.

Abigail Strickland sings the essential vocal parts that add a true duet style to the song, just as I had heard it.  It took a lot of years to get this song recorded but it remains one of  my all-time favorites,  and I think it'll be as timeless as the lovely Genie who inspired it.

This song was written in 1980 when I was still serving in the military and spending a lot of time overseas.  The contrast was how strange it felt to visit the US after 3 years and find that most of my friends had stayed in the same small town where we grew up.  I had lost the frame of reference, feeling like we had nothing in common anymore, nothing to relate to. 

Looking back, there was a sharp contrast in the ways that we socialized in the military - living and working together in a tight unit structure.  We were more likely to spend a lot of time together when we lived in a foreign country.  This song was an expression of  how odd it felt to visit  "back home".