While I’m Here

Through out the years I have been lucky enough to get to do quite a lot of touring. And especially with Sliotar we get to go back to places year after year. One of the best things for me about touring, apart from getting to sing my songs, is making new friends. One of the worst things is that you need to leave the new friends behind, and often you don’t get to see them for another year.

These are some of the emotions you just go through on tour and they become almost part of your everyday life on the road. I have seen musicians who just drift through all this without caring too much, and then putting on a good act when they meet again. But I can never do that, not because I would somehow be better… Not at all, just the opposite. It’s just that I always cared deeply about my friends. It might take a while for me to warm up to new people (Finnish thing…) but once I do, you are my friend for life. And even when I am back home, I think about the friends I made along the way all the time. I know you must be thinking how can I keep up with everybody, but my brain works in a funny way… (dyslexic thing). If I meet people, I remember them, I remember random stuff about them. I don’t do this on purpose, it just sticks. Now if I tried to remember something on purpose, I’d probably forget it in minutes…

But I am grateful of all the friends I made along the way. I am also grateful of all the new friends I made online, throughout this process of sharing my music. And I hope to get a chance to meet as many of you in person as possible 🙂

So this is a song for my friends, old, new, even the ones I haven’t had a chance to meet in person yet 🙂 And it is a reminder that when we do meet, we need to make the best of the limited time we have together. This is why I try to put my heart and soul into every live performance, I want the time we spend together to be special.

So that’s the story behind this weeks song. Now let me talk a little bit about songwriting. This weeks song really kicked me in the ass big time! After year and a half of writing and releasing songs every week, I do run a risk of repeating my self. And that happened with this weeks song… The original chord structure and melody of the verse was very close to a song I wrote about eight months ago. But when you are in the moment writing a song, you don’t think stuff like that. In fact, you can’t. It is creative process and something just takes you over. But few days after writing and recording the song, it started to sound familiar 😀

So in a panic I had to do some last-minute rewriting. This is something I do all the time, and every songwriter should learn to rewrite their own songs. And once again, the powers that be (those gods of songwriting somewhere high up there) granted me with something special. The final result was much better than what I started with 🙂

And a massive tank you to Nathan, my mastering engineer, who delivered the master in record time. It is vital to work with good people, who in a case of emergency will drop everything to help you. I just hope I can return the favour over and over again.

That’s all I have to say about this weeks song. You know what to do, share the music far and wide my friends 🙂

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE