Singled Out: Galen Hartley's You and Your Mother and Father

Families are a crazy. I used to say that I wrote about three things: revenge, my family, and fulfilling my personal destiny. Even when I write about other subjects, the resulting songs still seem to fall into one of those categories. Anyway, this is a family song.

Straightforward narratives aren't my strength, but what I'm trying to get across in this song is a sense of history - the stories we tell within our families, the roles we play, the way the past continues to affect the present, and all the ways things can change when the folks near to us die.

My mother and her parents all died within a few years of each other, and it was a little surreal to witness the summing up of their lives into one "way" that they would be remembered. You know? And it was tough to work against mom's new reputation as a saint while I was sorting through some of the craziness I had clearly inherited from her. And THEN I got to thinking about these seeds of craziness that just keep getting passed down the family line, and how we're lucky if we can just do a little bit better than our parents did. Sigh.

So, yeah... families are a strange and plentiful source of inspiration.