Here’s the “scratch” version of “I Can’t Stop That Now”. A scratch (short for scratch pad) is a recording for the purpose of developing and conceptualizing a song. It’s a place to lay vocal and instrument tracks in an exploratory and experimental fashion to frame up the final song. It’s another track on my current WIP, the album Perihelion.

I was going to compose a bio of the song and its lyrics, describing “where they came from”, the particulars surrounding the origins of the composition. Sometimes you just get a catchy chord progression going on guitar, and it inspires a mood or a phrase. Sometimes a few lines of lyrics will pop into your head, and they are the embryonic theme on which the rest is constructed. The late, great Jimmy Buffet wrote and recorded a song titled “Clichés”. It’s jam-packed with everyday phrases, and indeed clichés, as it tells a light short story and concludes; “Clichés. Good ways to say what you mean, and mean what you say.”

So that’s all the background I’ll volunteer for “I Can’t Stop That Now”. It’s a bit of a cliché which may have first given birth to the lyric, or the lyrics may have begun before the cliché was stumbled upon.

When I published the poem “I Rise”, which would become the lyrics for the song “Circles”, a reader astonished me with their comment. From their own perspective and objective viewpoint, they interpreted the mood of the piece diametrically opposite of the tenor in which it was written. It was a dark piece, from a depressive place, but the reader interpreted it as something of a motivation to carry on even when times were tough.

And so, I welcome your spin on “I Can’t Stop That Now”.

Paz