Where some of my song ideas come from, I have no frickin’ idea. I will just be sitting there, and boom, some little phrase, sometimes accompanied by a melody, just pops into my head. I like to think of it as the positive side of being attention deficient. With all those cells firing up there, in my brain, in all directions at all times and without mercy, it makes it difficult to keep one’s train of thought. But those same naughty little cells, those bastards, sometimes give me a little chunk of a tune, so I guess I’ll put off the lobotomy for a few more weeks.
"Jesus Didn’t Have A Car", from my CD, “Santa Monica”, is a song whose title “popped” into my brain, just like that, much to my surprise. I scribbled it down on a scrap of paper, and returned to it when I had a bit of time to sit with the guitar. In such a case, I ask myself, “well, what else about Jesus not having a car could be said”, and off we go.
Sometimes, when I have a title first, I will google it, just to see if there are any other songs by the same title, particularly if the title seems as though it could have been used before. For example, a title like “Why You Picked Me”, or “Forever Marie” might illicit such research. If I find that there are other songs with that title, it may not stop me from using it, but I still like to know.
With “Jesus Didn’t Have A Car”, however......I didn’t even fire up the computer. Surely, I thought, there are no songs with this title.
But after publishing the song, on my CD “Santa Monica”, one day I became curious, as songwriters sometimes are, and typed it into the search engine, with quotes, to see if there were any exact matches.
Ah, the Internet. There were thirteen exact matches for “Jesus didn’t have a car”, to my complete surprise. None, however, was a song title. Thirteen matches! All, of course, were used somewhere in text, on someone’s website about Jesus, on a discussion list, or in a sermon, etc. I clicked on a few, and realized that the term was popular enough.
But the fourteenth hit fascinated me. It was not an exact hit, but read...”Jesus didn’t have a car payment either”. I thought, now wouldn’t it be a gas to write a song with that title?
In the fall of 2005, I will release “Jesus Didn’t Have A Car Payment Either” on a new CD. Meanwhile, you can hear “Jesus Didn’t Have A Car” by clicking on this link.
