Hi Everyone,
Welcome to the March Song Lab. If you are new to the Supporting Subscriber Section, there is a full archive of Song Labs for you to access. Most Song Labs include me singing the song, what I was thinking about when I was writing the piece (musically and lyrically). Then at the end is a short tutorial, for those who would like to learn how to play the song yourself!
This particular song is about the accelerated speed of our lives and our world. There are usually pros and cons to any technological advance, technology itself is not necessarily a bad thing. We now have medical advances that can save lives and alleviate suffering, and yet we have endangered our planet through decades long use of fossil fuels. We can now communicate with people across the world with a computer keystroke, and yet we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information coming from every screen - all vying for our precious attention.
Humans are so amazingly clever. I mean the stuff we’ve created with our passion, imagination and opposable thumbs. And yet, our cleverness can have terrible consequences when it is not balanced with the wisdom we’ve gleaned from our personal and collective history. How important it is to stop, take a breath and ask, “Just because we can do something, does that mean we should?”
I start the song personally, a bit tongue-in-cheek, at a time when I’d been traveling so intensely I felt I needed to go out and gather up all the pieces of my soul I’d left all over the country. I encounter my own spirit waiting for me in a truckstop diner, waiting for me to realize I’d been moving faster than my soul could keep up. Eventually I talk about a story I’d heard from my friend, Philip Gulley, about how Mr. Gatling, the creator of the Gatling gun,( the first fast repeating rifle to be used during the Civil War) said that he’d created it because it would finally put an end to war—because what sane human being would send another human being into such terrible danger.
The song seems appropriate in these days when the current new administration is moving at lighting speed, making changes that are having devastating effects on people in this country and abroad and taking a chainsaw to our democracy itself. Brutality in the name of religion, nationalism or advancing some kind of technology is still brutality. It is careless, short sighted, and utterly spiritually bereft.
And so this month…The Speed of Soul.
As always, I’ve created guitar tablature you can download and an audiofile to go along with the tablature to help with learning the piece!
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