The One Minute Songs Return—and not a second too soon!

I love my one-minute songs like the brilliant, recalcitrant children they are. But I needed a break from them. And they from me.

The universe has a way of telling you what to do at any given moment—if you believe that nonsense about the universe (or God, or whatever) giving a damn about what you do. I do believe it, but perhaps not in the usual quasi-mystical way.

Rather, I believe you can only push so many electrons, protons, and neutrons around to your desiring before they push back. Or make a quantum leap. Or decay due to matter/anti-matter collisions. That is the way of the (subatomic) world, and what goes on down there eventually makes its way up to the macro world.

As physicists will tell you, matter on the subatomic level is just a wave of possibilities until you observe it; then it collapses into the one possibility you observe. But all of that observing, analyzing, and purposeful ordering takes its toll on the electrons who, when all is said and done, insist on asserting their natural order of things: disorder, chance—randomness as a way to keep things from becoming too orderly and predictable.

This is precisely what happened to me and the one minute songs: equipment started to go on the fritz, hard drives failed, recording software rebelled against my insistence on it working the same way every day; against me trying to make everything just so—against  my misbegotten tendency to try to assert control over my little corner of universe itself.

The universe said, “no.” So I said, “fine” and focused on other things—my TV show, my podcast, teaching piano. And I’m still focussing on those things. But the universe also tells me to take a break from those things after a few weeks of intensive focus—to let the electrons running around my iMac and brain randomize, disorder themselves, then reorder into something that I can observe with a fresh perspective.

So, after many months, this is a long way of saying, here’s the 2nd song from the Fall section of One Human Minute. On the 3rd day of summer, no less.

Maybe I’ll deliver the first song from the fall section next week.