The Meaning of the Blues

Stephanie Garofalo sings a story, while we try to unravel our own

Sometimes what you want and what you need are not the same.  Reason is and out to be the slave of the passions, said David Hume.  Not everyone lives that way, but most would if they could.  There is a double-sided Kandinsky with chaos on one side and control on the other.  One often toggles between them.

There is the purpose of writing the song and then there is the joy of hearing it heard from a beautiful voice who didn’t need the backstory of the song to get it across, as far as it could go.  Stephanie Garofalo is an exquisite musical theatre performer. I have witnessed her range, and she can do it all.  She doesn’t just get the intonation and the harmony, she also tells a story. She can be hilarious, she can be tragic. She is even an excellent scat singer. I wrote music and lyrics to “My Surrender,” but she is the narrator. She begins plaintively, then gets increasingly impatient.  I did not direct this at all.  She just intuited it.