You never know what’ll happen with a song…as I wrote earlier, I spontaneously wrote a song with Erin Ivey while we were both attending Jonatha Brooke‘s workshop at Blue Rock this summer. When I say spontaneously, I mean it. We went from meeting, to hearing Mabel Stark’s story, to writing on the porch in less than 8 hours. Total joy. We recorded it on the 3rd morning of the workshop…pretty quick turnaround!

We decided to forward the recording we made at the workshop to Richard Sandomir, the author of Mabel’s obituary, the gorgeous piece of writing that set it all off. He sent a nice note back, and forwarded it to the head of the Overlooked series at the New York Times, who asked if they could share it.

Thankfully Erin is quick on her feet and decided that we couldn’t just have them linking to the Dropbox file we had, so she set up this landing page at www.thetigersong.com telling about Mabel, the story of writing the song, and the chance to download it if you want it! I made a lyric video so you can sing along if you like. Mabel would dig it if you did, I think.

Write that song, kids! And meet new people to write with…cool things happen. (And check out all the great stuff they do at Blue Rock Artist Ranch!)