IRISHMAN FOR HIRE

A few weeks ago, I went out to lunch with a friend of mine. We were swapping stories of our youth; the fun and the outlandish things we did when we were in our late teens and our early twenties. During the conversation, the topic of Crossfire came up. I shared with him some of the stories and fun we had had as a band. I also told him the honest truth about the frustrations we encountered as well.

“I’ve always been curious, how do people write songs? Do you just sit down with a piece of paper, decide to write a song and something just comes to you?” he asked.

“Sometimes, yeah, it does,” I responded. But I didn’t want to be glib, so I continued, “But most of the time, it starts with a personal story. Something happens in your life and it affects you in one way or another, and then, after a while, you just have to write it down.”

And that is how it has always been for me as a writer. Most of the lyrics I have written in my life started out as a personal experience or a story that would get stuck in my head. Somehow a piece of music would start playing in my brain and the words would just come to me. Most of the time, I would just free write and then put away the rough draft. Later, I would edit the lyrics until I felt the song was perfect.

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I was driving home late a few weeks ago after a very long day, so I decided to put in my U2 “Live at Red Rocks” CD so that I could sing along with it in order to help me keep my eyes on the road. As I pulled into my driveway and was about to turn off the car, I heard the familiar and eerily subtle beginning of “40” as Bono said to the crowd, “This is forty, sing this with me.”

I put my head back against the head rest, turned the volume all the way up, closed my eyes and started singing along with the CD. In an instant I was transformed back to a concert hall two decades ago when I was standing in the crowd while U2 performed “40” right in front of me. Twenty thousand people of different races, creeds, religions, political backgrounds and various other ideologies came together as one voice to sing the chorus with Bono:

I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long, how long
How long, to sing this song?

We sang as loud as we could and as the band on the stage had settled into the mellow, soft drum beat, we sang louder. We came together as a community around this one anthem singing loudly back to the stage. As the house lights came up and we filed out into the city streets, twenty thousand strong kept singing the chorus to “40” in unison over and over again. It was electric. The goose bumps ran up and down my spine as we all headed off singing in various directions, consumed by our new marching orders, as we spread the word that the time for hatred and intolerance in the world had come to an end.

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