A song is a song only when sung

Dave Keeney is a friend of mine, who happens to be brilliant, though that’s not a word he’d likely use to describe himself. He’s an apple farmer, a musician, a story teller, a mensch.

Dave on the left, Old Town, New Year’s Eve (photo by Derek Daniel)

First time he met my Dad, my Dad (once a fighter pilot) was in bad shape after a series of strokes that made him pretty much unintelligible. Except to Dave. After trading stories, Dave got out his guitar and sang one of the funniest songs I had ever heard, “John Denver’s Last Flight.”

Later, after dinner, I asked Dave to play the song again. He would not.

“Why not?”
“Don’t remember it.”
“But you just sang it, how could you forget something you know?”
“I made it up.”

I still regret not ever hearing that song again, and Dave never gave it a second thought. The song is a song while sung, and that’s more than enough for Dave, even as I (and I am embarrassed to say it) thought of the song’s potential commercial value..

If the product is the goal, then we lose the “we” in this thing we’re doing, whatever this thing we’re doing happens to be.


Once an object is made, a song sung, a story scribbled down on the back of of an envelope, it’s no longer us, merely an artifact of who we were.

We become machines, we are machines, in our relentless chase to create the perfect product, make perfection a standard in whatever we do. We want everything to be professional, the new code word for standardized.

The us is in the process, the joy is in the doing.
A song is a song only as a song is being sung.