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In late 2005 I also took up Karaoke at the now-closed Lu & Ruby's Bar and Grille. It was a bit of a transformative experience for me. My vocal skills improved and I developed a better stage presence. Getting frequent smiles and hugs from pretty young women was a most pleasant side benefit. I also got some feedback on my songs. I could hand the KJ a background CD and then sing my stuff in front of a live audience.

My first new songs were novelty pieces: "Pills From the Internet" and "The Dub-a-ya Strut" (both available on my GarageBand.com page). I'm a slow writer. By the end of '06, I'd completed exactly one "serious" song, my "Symphony of Eternal Tenderness." The verses were inspired by the general party atmosphere of Lu & Ruby's, especially on Thursday nights, when the DJs would play lots of loud, bouncy rap and hip-hop. The place was always crowded.

I wrote a few songs in early 2007, but I grew to dislike them. Then around May my computer broke so my musical composition activities came to a halt. I continued to work on lyrics. At the same time, my collaborator, BRP Inc, had written about two dozen background tracks on his computer using the Fruity Loops program.

In January of 2008 I showed up at Lu & Ruby's on a Thursday night, mostly just for a few beers. Pete, the new owner, asked me if I was going to sing. I said something like, "You mean I can sing even if it isn't Karaoke night?" Pete assured me that I could. At first I was going to rap some lyrics I'd written earlier to one of the BRP Inc beats, but that didn't quite work out, so over a few weekends, I revised my lyrics and BRP composed an awesome new beat and gave me some important suggestions. The result was "Bubble Pop Apocalypse." I first performed it on a Karaoke night. It "brought the house down," as they say.

In the summer of '08 I began putting together various lyrical fragments that were symbolically about myself. I'd sworn off of "self-expression," but a fool returns to his folly, like it says in the Good Book. The fragments fit together quite well and were a perfect match for some background music I'd written a few years earlier. The result was "Gonna Be the Man."

In the fall of '08, Kozy Koffee in Highland sponsored an open mic night that drew performers and fans from Brighton, Hartland, Milford, Keego Harbor and beyond. Works of local painters and photographers were on display. Sometimes there would be three or for alternative rock bands playing. I did some of my own stuff and it was generally well-received. The open mic days are over, but I'm probably not the only one who remembers them as a kind of micro Golden Age, a little Camelot on Duck Lake Road.

I did my one and only public performance of "Symbolist Lullaby" at Kozy Koffee. The poem is deliberately intended to put people to sleep. Give it a listen if you suffer from insomnia. If you're a DJ, you might try playing it as the last song of the night. It might do a better job of clearing out a bar than any bouncer could do.

I spent much of the winter of '09 working on a piece that still doesn't seem to click. I haven't posted it anywhere. Sometimes I overcome writer's block and then wonder why I bothered.

Ever since the crash of '08 I'd been writing down fragments relating to the concept of a "Stimulus Package." After giving up on my other Big Project of this year, I assembled, revised and augmented those fragments (maybe "shored against my ruins," to use of phrase from Eliot's "Wasteland") so I could perform them over a new beat by BRP Inc. I like the final result, but it has a "heavy metal" kind of texture and some "classic horror movie" imagery. If you don't like heavy metal, you would probably not like it.

I was getting kind of burnt out on the whole lyrics thing, so now I'm taking a break. You might ask how a guy could "take a break" from writing lyrics for one or two or three songs every year. I dunno... Hard to explain. Anyway, the working title for my next album is "Amorous Telepathy." Who knows, some day I might actually finish it!