MY MIND'S EYE - New Demo

Plus, VCA show ticket news!

Tickets for my show on March 30, 2024, at Vashon Center for the Arts will go on sale on Friday, 1/19/24 at Noon Pacific. Visit https://vashoncenterforthearts.org/

Paid subscribers to this newsletter will get an email on Wednesday, 1/17/24 at Noon Pacific with a link to early bird tickets.

The last time I played VCA it sold out pretty quickly, so if you want to be sure to be there, you’ll want to act fast.

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“My Mind’s Eye” is a true story. It’s a spiritual seeker song telling the tale of my December 2017 meditation retreat on the Oregon coast. For 17 days I was completely off-grid with zero distractions or responsibilities.

Technically, I was in semi-retreat mode. I broke my vow of silence to sing. And every evening after dinner, I would go fishing for songs. I had an unusual string of good luck coming up with song starts—I call them seeds.

Back home, I played all 21 seeds for my partner, Elaine Summers, and we were both incredibly excited by what we heard. 

14 seeds got an A rating. (5 of those an A+)
5 were deemed to have “potential.” 
2 were total clunkers. 

This was an unusually high batting average. I wondered why. When dealing with creativity, you can never really put your finger on how it all works, but I suspect that Tom Petty had something to do with it. He’d passed away the month before, and I’d been spending time with his music, listening to and playing his songs. Over and over, I was blown away by what Tom could do with simple, garden-variety chord changes.

When you’ve been writing songs as long as I have, it’s easy to slip into a rut where nothing you come up with sounds interesting enough. But on this trip, I was able to hear in a new way, uncluttered by my inner critic’s voice saying things like this:

“Really, Pete? I IV & V again? Can’t you do better than that?”

Wrong question, inner critic! A better question is, “What can you do with that?”

Inspired by Petty’s trademark economy, I embraced musical simplicity and abandoned any thoughts I needed to break new ground. Rather than looking for new terrain, I’ll happily stay where I am and just dig deeper.

After surveying all the new seeds we picked our favorites and got to work—the real work of turning seeds into completed songs. With “My Mind’s Eye,” the original sketch had a title and hook in place, so we skipped past the whole head-scratching session where we try to figure out what the song wants to be about. Not that we do that every time. Some songs are not about being about anything at all. Is that confusing? I’ll try again. Some songs are all about not being about anything at all. It’s still confusing, but you get what I mean. I love a good cryptic lyric, but these days I’m leaning more toward songs that make at least some kind of sense. 

“My Mind’s Eye” makes perfect sense. It begins like this:

Went to the Oregon Coast
The place that I love the most
My wagon filled to the gills
It took me three days to pack
You thought I’d never come back
But then I knew that I will
I was a man on a mission
Sans adult supervision
Rolling along under the Aberdeen skies
With an eye on my mind’s eye

Many songs are vying to be included on my next album. Time will tell if “My Mind’s Eye” makes the list. If not, I’ll save it for the next record.

Until then, please enjoy the demo.

Peace & Love Songs,

Pete

PS: Paid subscribers can download “My Mind’s Eye”—in hi-res if that’s your thing—by visiting my ‘rarities’ page.

Cannon Beach. Photo by Dave Hoefler