“May you rise each day with sunlight in your heart, success on your path,
answers to your prayers and that smile that I love to see.“
(Adi Shalom-Blankleder)

These words certainly are worthy those of a poet or of a philosopher. Or else they could be the welcome formula of an alien race or of a long gone civilization from the Golden Ages. And I am pleased to report that these noble words once were addressed to me. Since then I have kept them in my mind and they remind me to pass on their legacy to people I want to meet in a calm and friendly manner. In fact when I read them for the first time, I was so impressed I sat down behind my piano straight away and wrote a song around them. Then something strange happened. The more I worked out the arrangements, the more the song developed into a furious and raging monster. There was nothing I could do about it.

You know, when I write songs, only in the very first stages I keep them under my compositional control. My theory about songwriting is that from a certain point on only defined by the author and the song itself (and I am always close to say „her-or himself“), it is the song that tells you what you have to do with it. Trust your songs, would be my concept of an ideal composer. But there isn’t a guarantee for success. Sometimes, even if you clearly get what the song is all about, you may be the wrong author for it. And there is nothing worse but a disappointed song. It may haunt you for the rest of your life and that explains why songwriting is not a job for cowards.

In this case, the song, meanwhile titled „Those Wonderful Things“, turned into an apocalyptic angel transforming the sweet and shining lyrics into flaming bowls of wrath. But why? What made my song so angry? Why did he refuse the friendliness of my original intentions. Maybe the answer is that the words, though sung in a seemingly wrong context, turned out even more impressive and desirable exactly by that. Not only were they indestructible, the more force and violence they encountered, the stronger they became. But even the unwelcomed anger rising up in my song made perfect sense in the end. It gushes from the gap between our dearest wishes and our cruel reality and may encourage us to overcome the most devastating obstacles on our inticrated trail to a better world. That was, what the song was trying to tell me and I did my best to follow it.

And for you out there, from the depth of my heart I can only repeat Adi’s lovely lines (with a little ingredient from Utopian days;-)

„May you rise each day with sunlight in your heart, success on your path,
answers to your prayers and that s.m.i.²l.e. that I love to see.“

Marian Gold