This week’s song is Dreams of McKenzie. Here’s the MP3:

How much I like songs I wrote or co-wrote more than 3 months ago is an ever-changing thing with no pattern that I can discern. For example when Ronnie and I first wrote The Voice of the Howling, I liked it, but I didn’t love it. Then one day I had my audio player on shuffle and it came on. I noticed the neat Halloween vibe Ronnie added in the middle of the song, and all of the sudden it became one of my all-time favorites. At the risk of getting ahead of myself alphabetically, Voice is probably the scariest song I have ever written, along with Sanitarium.

Dreams is a song that Ronnie and I wrote a few years ago, and right from the day it was finished, it became one of my favorites, and it has stayed that way.

When I was in high school (and before that, for that matter), Johnny’s Red Door Lounge (which was actually called Funderburk’s, Johnny’s last name) was one of the few places we could get into that would sell us beer. The game in there was partners Eight Ball with the winners to keep the table and the losers to buy the beers. If you were good at pool, you could play and drink pretty much for free all night. McKenzie (her last name, actually) was a girl I dated my junior year. She was very good at pool, so we won a lot.

The trips out to the country to sit on the hood and drink (even more) beer are also mentioned in Mustangs.

The first two lines

“Black hair, hazel eyes and some quarters for the jukebox
I want to hear blues but she keeps playing hard rock”

just came to me one day almost totally out of the blue. McKenzie had dark hair, but I actually can’t recall what color eyes she had. Even back in high school, I was pretty into the Blues (particularly, at that time, the Allman Brothers variety) and I recall many times I wished for (but never got) control over the jukebox.

I think if someone told me they would only listen to one of my songs, this would be the one I would pick.