Tag: songwriting

Take A Nap

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

May 2016. The vice president over our group called and asked me to come to his office.

He hardly ever talked to me. I knew before I stood up.

I knocked, he waved me in, and he said it from behind his desk — times are tough, the decisions have been hard, we’re going to have to let you go, HR will handle the rest. Then he got up and walked out of the room.

Nine years at that company. No thank you, no acknowledgment of anything I’d built there. He put it down and left.

I don’t hold it against him. He was a man in a bad position at a company in a worse one, and somebody handed him a list. But the way he carried himself in that room disappointed me and it still does.

Fifteen of us went that day. It was the sixth round of layoffs — a over a thousand people had already gone ahead of us. I’d lasted a long time.

I went to Starbucks.

Got a coffee, sat down, and called my wife to tell her. Then I called a former manager to ask if she knew of anything, and she did — she gave me a lead and offered to write me a referral letter.

I filled out the application at that table. Before I drove home, before I’d been unemployed four hours, I’d already applied for the job I’d eventually get.

Then I went home and my wife said: I love you. Now, take a nap.

She knew. She’d watched me be miserable there for a long time and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise on the one day it stopped.

So I took a nap. My son was eight. We told him my job had changed and that we’d figure it out, and as far as I can tell it barely registered in his world.

Here’s the part I still marvel at.

That morning, before any of it, I prayed about that job. Not vaguely. I said God, I hate it here. I’d be glad to leave. And I named a number — this many months of severance and I’d walk out grateful.

Two hours later in that VP’s office, HR told me what my package was.

It was two months more than I’d asked for.

I said something like okay — wow, cool, that’s awesome, thank you. Which is a strange thing to say to a woman whose job that morning was firing people, but she took it well.

Interview about a month later. Offer at eight weeks. New job three months out, in a new city, in a new house. And I played more at that one. I was lighter. Nobody had buried me in projects yet and I made myself available to my family in a way I hadn’t been in years.

That firing was an answer to a prayer I’d said out loud that morning.

So this year I wrote a song about a man it almost destroys.

He’s got a family he’s been providing for by not being around. Then he gets the speech. His response?— they went back to their mansions and threw my stuff in the yard — and he drives home in the middle of a Tuesday and walks into his own house in daylight.

His wife looks like somebody he used to know. His kids have changed and he can’t say when. And he works out that all the unfinished business he’d been staying late for was never in that building.

None of that happened to me. I came home in the middle of the day and my wife told me to go lie down.

I think I wrote the version that didn’t happen because it easily could have.

I’ve never lost track of my family, but I’ve come close enough to see where the road goes. There was a stretch in 2020 when I was at the computer by six-thirty and still there at dinner time, day after day, only duty making me do it.

The song is a warning I wrote to myself about a road I’ve been on and haven’t walked to the end of. It’s easier to sing about a man who did.

Falling More

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I was standing at the stove making my son’s eggs. I’d already fixed my wife’s breakfast and she was sitting there eating it, doing something on her phone, not paying any attention to me.

I stopped cooking and just watched her.

My son looked over. “Dad, what are you grinning at?”

“Your mama, boy.”

That happens at my house. It’s not a special occasion. I’ve been married twenty-seven years and she is still, to me, the most interesting thing in any room she’s in, and every so often I lose track of what I was doing.

The song came out of that morning, though not directly.

What actually started it was a sliding riff I’d been messing with on the guitar — nothing planned, just something I liked the sound of and kept playing. Somewhere in the middle of it I said two words out loud.

Falling more.

And the rest of it showed up. Not all at once, but fast, because I finally had the thing everything else could hang on.

I keep falling more
Like there’s no floor to this thing
There’s never been a floor
I still watch her like a sunset, scared to even blink
I haven’t found the bottom yet
Falling more

Here’s the part I’ve come to love about writing songs.

The chorus is your thesis, and you get to sing it. One idea, stated plainly, repeated until the repetition itself starts making the argument. Then the verses are your evidence — the specific things that prove the claim you keep making.

I keep falling more. That’s the claim. And the first piece of evidence is a man who forgot he was cooking eggs.

Once you notice the structure you can’t stop seeing it. “Hotel California” gives you the whole mood in the chorus and then walks you through the story underneath. “The Thunder Rolls” — the chorus is the storm, the verses are what’s happening while it breaks. You’re not decorating a hook. You’re arguing a case, and you happen to be singing it.

Which is why the hard part is never the chorus. The hard part is finding the idea, and the idea is almost always just a phrase you stumble into while doing something else.

Redemption keeps showing up in everything I write, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a coincidence. I live a redeemed life. God saved me from myself, and once you’ve been on the receiving end of that, you start recognizing the shape of it in other places.

Marriage is one of those places. Two people who are not finished, staying, and covering for each other’s worst material long enough that both of them come out better than they went in. Twenty-seven years of somebody choosing to keep doing that for me.

So the love song isn’t only a love song. I don’t set out to write about grace. It just turns out to be underneath the thing I was writing about anyway.

Songwriting also makes me find out what I think.

You’re either writing from your own view or you’re inside somebody else’s, and the second one has a habit of changing your mind. I’ve walked into a song feeling one way about a situation and walked out of it feeling differently, because I had to sit inside a perspective long enough to make it sing. That’s not a technique. It’s just what happens when you have to say a thing well enough to repeat it.

Mostly I do it because I like it. I’ve spent this year making things, and this is the one that reminds me I’m not only the guy who writes about frameworks.

She’s heard it. She loved it.

She still doesn’t notice when I’m watching her, though — not that morning, not most mornings. The recording is finished, verses and bridge and all. The case it makes keeps building anyway, in the kitchen, while the eggs go cold.

The Only Way Out Is Through

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Rest Week

I wrote a song this week. It’s called “The Only Way Out Is Through,” and I didn’t set out to write a midpoint reflection on the year — but that’s what came out.

The verses are claustrophobic on purpose. Same four walls. Weight on the chest. A voice saying you’re not enough. That’s not a metaphor I had to reach for. That’s the inside of a lot of days this year — the ones where six out of seven habits was all I had, the deadlines I missed, the promotion I keep circling without walking into.

The chorus is the thing I keep relearning: there’s no way over it, no way around it. You can’t skip the hard middle of anything worth doing. You go through, or you don’t go.

I’m 175 days into this year. Halfway. And if I’m honest, the first half was mostly the verses — head down, knuckling up, counting to one and getting up again. Proving I could show up. Proving the engine runs.

But the bridge is where the song surprised me. I’d planned a song about endurance — hold the line, keep the grip, outlast the hard part. What came out instead was a moment where the hands give out and the rope goes slack, and the fall never comes. Where you stop holding and discover you didn’t have to.

That’s the part I didn’t plan. Halfway through this year, I’m starting to understand that “the only way out is through” was never just about gritting my teeth harder. Most of the getting-through hasn’t been me at all. The days I thought I was holding the rope, Someone has been holding me.

Here is the song:

The Only Way Out Is Through

The Song That Outgrew the Woman I Wrote It For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It must have been 2013. We were at our Toastmasters club, and our mentor — a woman who had been in the organization a long time, the kind of presence who leads by example without announcing she’s leading — stood up to give a speech.

She titled it Watch Me.

I don’t remember every word. I remember the vulnerability. She had come through a relationship where the man she’d been with told her she wouldn’t make it without him. Then he left anyway. The contradiction was the part she wanted us to hear — you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell someone they’re nothing without you and then walk out the door. But she had walked through it. She was standing at the lectern as proof. The title wasn’t a question. It was a declaration. Watch me.

I sat in that audience and felt two things at the same time.

The first was admiration. Her pain was real and she wasn’t hiding it, but the speech wasn’t a confession. It was a war cry dressed in survival clothes.

The second was anger.

I am married to a woman I have loved for twenty-seven years. I have spent every one of those years trying to be the kind of husband who does the opposite of what had been done to the woman at the lectern. The thought of telling my wife she couldn’t make it without me — and then leaving — is unimaginable to me. Not because I’m a perfect husband. Because love doesn’t do that. Love doesn’t do that.

I wrote a song after her speech. I called it Watch Me, after her title. It was her voice — a survivor speaking back to the man who had left her. Watch me, as I get over you. Watch me, as I do something new. I played it for her. She appreciated it.

I was proud of it then. I’m still proud of it now — because the thirty-five-year-old who wrote it was doing the work he could do at thirty-five. He heard a story that mattered. He gave her a song.

Thirteen years is a long time. And songs that get written for one person sometimes outgrow the moment they were written for.

What I Wrote This Week

I was going through old material looking for things I could rebuild with Suno, the AI music tool I’ve been using to arrange songs I’ve written over the years. Watch Me came up in the queue. I listened to the AI’s first pass at the original lyrics, and the words felt thin to me. Not wrong. Thin. Like the song was reaching for something it didn’t yet have the vocabulary to say.

I cracked it open. And what came out wasn’t a polish of the original. It was a different song.

The protagonist changed. The 2013 version was her. The 2026 version is a man — working class, pre-dawn shifts, a chain around his neck made of lies he used to believe. A bridge that prays through the worst of it and finds Someone bigger walking the rest of the road with him.

The song was no longer hers. But it was hers underneath.

What Her Courage Seeded

There’s a kind of empathy that almost nobody talks about. Most writing about empathy makes it sound gentle — sitting with someone’s pain, holding space, listening well. All of that matters. But there’s another kind of empathy, and it’s the one that made me write Watch Me in the first place.

It’s not gentle. It’s a cry for justice. It’s a sound that leads the charge.

When that mentor stood at the lectern and told us what had been done to her, the empathy I felt wasn’t quiet. It was furious on her behalf. I can’t believe a man did this to her. Love doesn’t do that. The anger didn’t belong to me — I hadn’t earned the right to it the way she had — but it could be channeled. Into a song. Into something I could give her.

That was 2013. The 2026 version is what happened when that anger sat in me for thirteen years and grew up. It stopped being a gift to her — she didn’t need it anymore — and became something that could reach somebody else. Some recovering man, somewhere, who needed a sound to use. The same fury, looking for somewhere new to go.

That’s what her courage seeded in me. Not just her song. The capacity to write somebody else’s.

What Songwriters Owe

Songwriters and novelists do this all the time. We inhabit experiences we haven’t had. Phase Defiant is a man writing a woman’s story. Watch Me started as a husband writing a survivor’s voice and ended as a husband writing a recovering man’s voice. Neither of which is mine.

The danger is obvious. You can get the experience wrong. You can flatten it. You can use someone else’s pain as a costume for your own performance. Every writer who picks up a story that isn’t theirs has to wrestle with whether they have any business carrying it.

I think the answer comes down to this: if you can’t be furious on the person’s behalf, you don’t have any business writing their story. If you can’t channel the anger that the situation actually deserves, you’ll write a polite version that doesn’t honor what they lived through.

The empathy without the fury produces something that sounds like a Hallmark card. The fury without the empathy produces something exploitative. You need both. And you don’t always know which one you’re holding until afterward.

I wrote the original Watch Me because I was angry for her. I wrote the new one because that anger had matured into something that could reach further than her one voice ever could.

The 2013 version ended with you are never going to put me down again. The 2026 version ends differently. The man in the rewrite isn’t talking to anybody anymore. He’s walking. Someone bigger than the lies you told, walkin’ with me down the rest of my road.

The defiance is still there. Underneath it now is something the younger me didn’t yet know how to write.

Survival doesn’t end with proving the other person wrong. It ends with not having to prove anything to them anymore. It ends with the road becoming yours again — even when you started somebody else’s story to find your way back to it.

That’s what her speech taught me. It just took me thirteen years to write it down properly.

Watch me.