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December 27th, 2016

12/27/2016

Spurz writes:
   A band without a gig is just a bunch of players wishing they had someone to play for, and our regular first Friday at the Downwind Restaurant and Lounge has sustained the Band of Desperate Men for over ten years. The place is an attraction in its own right: its deck overlooking the Peachtree-Dekalb Airport runway gives a great view of private planes taxiing in and out and an atmosphere ripe with jet-A to accompany the best hamburger in Atlanta. Our audience has grown from people who came for those amenities and stuck around when they heard our tunes. We’ve seen a lot of folks come and go, got them dancing between the tables, and often heard their stories.
A while back I got an e-mail from a Downwind friend  named Kara, a nurse, who I hadn’t seen for a while. Turned out she’d been having health issues, but she wanted me to know she was better and would come out to see us before long. She finished with, “Thank God for healing.” Just at that time, another pal—a doctor—had playfully suggested I should write a song for him. Our Doc Oster is a physician too. So I came up with “This I Know.” I said, “There can never be too much singing in the world. . . ; too much laughing in the world. . .; and there can never be too much healing in the world—This I know.”
   The guys know this tune as “For Michael,” and this is how it sounded when we recorded out live set up in Sautee, Georgia, a couple years ago.

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Let Go of My Hand

12/9/2016

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Britt writes:
Clay Spurz and I did not become rich and/or famous. But, as luck would have it, we did get older. The two of us would sing from time to time in the interim years of careers and raising children. One day, we were recording some tracks in the large old-fashioned cedar closet in his attic, and, in a break, I started singing “Let Go of My Hand,” a tune I’d been tinkering with. It reminisces about my daughter, Amanda, and my son, DeSha, on the day she graduated from high school and and he from college. There’s a photo of baby DeSha balancing on my outstretched hand before he could even walk (babies can do that). “A photo can freeze what a hand cannot hold.” And there are lots of images in my mind of first solo bike rides, swims in the deep end, and those graduation days. “Let go of my hand, I’ll be right here. . . .”
Spurz turned on the machine, and I sang it as it came out in the track below, adding harmonies later. Spurz wept as I was singing. “And the next twenty times I listened,” he says. He put in some backup guitar, and we used it on our first CD. People started asking for it and closing their eyes as they listened. That’s sweet.
Ironically, I wrote the tune not too long after the current band had played Eddie's Attic in Decatur, where we shared the stage with a duet that played an original song about their children. I said to Spurz, “If I ever write a song about my children, just shoot me.”
So here's my song about my children. “A poppa so proud, he’s about to explode.”

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December 27th, 2016

Let Go of My Hand

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