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22 August 2000 A lot of songwriters have likened their songs to children -- a very apt analogy, I think. The nurturing, the disciplining, the fear when you send them out in the world to compete and to be judged, the pleasure you derive from watching them grow. Waking Hour, then, is that long-promised dinner party at my house. They come spilling from their bedrooms and introduce themselves one by one to the guests. Here's Enough To Go By in his cowboy costume and plastic six-shooter; Soon Love Soon in her batik sundress, smelling faintly of incense; Momentum, a teenager in that awkward gangly-limbs phase, with a defiant ring in her nose; Gravity, a thin twig of a child with eyes too bright for his pale face. There comes a point with every song when I realize that it has a life outside of my relationship with it. Usually it happens when someone writes me, describing a moment in his life when the song was suddenly his intimate companion. Or I discover one of the waltzes has become a regular at the local dance hall. "I didn't know about that," I say, and get a shrug for a reply. That's when I lose them, in a way. I don't mind it, though. - VT
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