Behind the Music #1 - Monday Morning

Out of all the songs I've recorded recently, Monday Morning is by far the oldest. 2005 was a crazy year. I was hired (and fired) from Lenny Kravitz' world tour and then Katrina came along changed everything. It was rough and partly because these things separated me from the band I was in at the time (Trombone Shorty and Orleans Ave.) and public performance (which I'm addicted to). It also brought me closer to what I've always wanted to do, write music.

I started out on guitar and learned saxophone to play guitar in the high school jazz band. I took a liking to the sax and wound up majoring in Jazz Saxophone in college. Being a professional saxophonist and a full-time college student with two majors, guitar found it's temporary place on the back burner. However, with everything that was going on in 2005, I started playing the guitar more. I started writing again.

For the most part, all the songs I wrote in 2005 were horrible. But all horrible songs have minute glimmers of hope and lead to better songs and ideas. This is how Monday Morning came to be. The songs is simple: Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus and it sounds like a Beatles song (I was listening to Beatles at the time).

It's a Katrina/Love song. It's about surviving and yet losing in the process. The first line "Monday Morning has left me dry" is a direct metaphorical reference to Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans on a Monday Morning. I had evacuated and escaped the floods but was empty because of it. I was left dry for better or for worse.

The second motif in the song refers to a girl I met in Rome in early January 2006. It was one of those meetings where you feel like you've known a complete stranger all of your life. It was great. It was my first kiss. A beautiful Brazilian in Rome. Completely unreal. Poetically beautiful and tragic at the same time because my stay with her eventually came to an end... when I "whispered softly and got on a train"... a train to Napoli. Man was that ever a painful experience. The train was so crowded I had to sit on the floor and I was exhausted from the lack of sleep, and I was missing her.

"Thinking about you every night and day" are the written lyrics. What actually saying is "Thinking about Ju..." My "friends" nickname. I love sneaking subtle yet direct messages into the lyrics.

Anyway, some time after Rome, we both had a dream that I was singing this song with my band and she was there at the concert. A bit grandoise considering that the songs wasn't quite in style with what the band was playing at the time and I was rarely featured as a vocalist or songwriter in that group. Two years later, the bands sound had changed, they wanted to learn the song, and incredibly she just so happened to be in Miami (she had never been to the US before) when my band was playing there and I got to sing the song to her. It was the most powerful feeling I had ever felt on the stage.

Sweet/Sour...Love/Pain...Winning/Losing... opposites, yes, but they are dependent on eachother.

We are survivors because we have lost.