This is a song I wrote a very long time ago but only got around to recording and uploading to the internet recently.
It’s the song I play by default anytime I sit at the piano and it’s what I call the song of my heart – I could literally listen to this song on repeat endlessly without ever getting tired of it.
It’s a sad, hauntingly beautiful kind of song, so if you’re looking for something happy and upbeat you definitely aren’t going to find it here. Go listen to In The Cold Sky instead. It’s a much lighter happier kind of song Ray + I did together.
Anyways, once you hit play on the song below, scroll down for the story.
About This Song
Someone commented on my SoundCloud, “There’s something about this song that relieves some tension in my heart. What story plays in your head when you listen to this song?”
Well, I guess the story starts with how I learned how to play the piano: I only had 3 lessons.
My grandma was a really good pianist – she actually was the organist at our church, played piano for the Comtra Theatre and even gave piano lessons. She started teaching me how to play when I was about 3 or 4 years old. She had a piano book and was teaching me the basics. Then she got really sick and died of cancer.
I cried for 3 days non-stop – my whole world crashed. All I had left of my grandma was her piano.
So, I would try to play it. I taught myself some more basics by using the Reader’s Digest Children Songbook that she had. Rainbow Connection by Kermit the Frog was my favorite song out of that book to play.
Then a few more years went by and after I learned to play guitar I also learned a couple of basic chords of the piano. My mom was playing the piano too, so I learned a couple of things then. C chord, D minor chord…I sort of fell in love with the A minor chord and this song started…and really just never stopped.
One time I played this song on a grand piano in our high school auditorium for an audience of 0. Nobody else was there. The grand piano was a little too “in-tune” for my taste, but the reverb in the auditorium was awesome.
Another time I played this song was on the old beat up piano in the hallway of my college dorm. Not sure why there was a piano there or if we were even supposed to/allowed to play it but that was an example of the perfect sound – lots of reverb in the hall and from the stairs and the piano definitely hadn’t been tuned in eons.
I recorded this song on our Yamaha Digital Piano. That piano is great, don’t get me wrong – but this song truly sounds a lot better on a real piano – better if the piano is older and slightly out of tune because then you really get a nice effect with the reverb and the harmonies of all the notes in between.
There’s really only one piano in the world it sounds right on – and that’s my grandma’s piano that’s sitting in my mother’s dining room. It hasn’t been tuned in decades. It’s the right piano for a song like this – not just because it sounds the best, but because it’s my grandma’s piano.
While the Yamaha digital piano makes it hard to really capture that real piano sound, it did at least do one very important thing – it captured the song as a midi file and made it super easy to record. Literally just plug your laptop in the piano, open up logic pro and press record.
This is the song of my heart, and I can’t just let it sit neglected in my head for no one to ever know or hear.
Everybody Knows – The Lyrics
Some people might wonder why this song is called Everybody Knows…
Well, when I play it I sort of have these lyrics going on in my head.
Everybody Knows Your Sorrow
Everybody knows there’s something
Everybody knows there’s nothing
Everybody knows there’s something
wrong with —what if i tell you there’s something i don’t know
there’s something i wanted,
there’s something i don’t know,
i don’t know the way to go
i don’t know the way to go…Do you know the answers?
Know the answers?Everybody’s running from something
running from tomorrow
everybody knows your sorrow
knows your sorry
Yeah. Super depressing I guess. But I like depressing music.
I don’t know why but there’s something about depressing music that actually makes me feel happier. It’s weird to some people, but I take comfort in knowing there are actually a lot of other people who love the sad depressing stuff and not just because they’re depressed. Like my youngest daughter said to me once, The sad songs are the ones that have meaning. We all know the happy ones are fake.
Anyways, this is my song. 🙂 Eventually I might record it “for real” in a studio on a real piano…but that’s probably going to have to wait. Now is better than never.
In the meantime, you can Follow Me on Soundcloud Here and also you can listen to some stuff Ray + I have released under Radiant Zero.
None of this is our best work – but some work to show is always better than none.