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Song Notes

Bonus song notes for Sportscar Lady with a Stationwagon Life

Below I've tried to answer the kinds of questions I wish I could ask songwriters.; I'm building on the song notes in the song booklet. if there's something else you'd like to know, just ask; I can always "take the fifth" Amendment: jenny@hinckley.com

1. Sportscar Lady with a Stationwagon Life

The title/refrain of this song appeared in my mind one day and hung there - no clue about how the song might go - for about five years during my first college teaching job. Probably the sportscar image derived from my delight in getting rides, while I was growing up, in my brother's blue Renault, his red MG-TD, and his white TR-3 with a red racing stripe.   My second and third cars were station-wagons.

During those five years, my family began to assert "You'll never write that song!" But one summer, as supporting sheet rock panels while our neighbor carpenter nailed them to my bedroom ceiling, the song started arriving: in between stints as a caryatid (like those holding up the porch on the Acropolis in Athens), I hastily jotted down words and worked out rhymes and images on my fingers. I believe I had just bought my first and only pickup truck so....

Hearing it, my family was inclined to tell me: "Great song! but you'd have to know you to appreciate it!" Not so! The details may be person specific but the clash between dreams and reality is near universal - perhaps especially for busy, creative women, or for INFPs.

I always knew that, if I ever recorded my work, this song would be the title cut.

2. Little Things

The references span 18 years of friends; most are still in my life.

In the last verse "the ties that bind" comes from the old hymn "Blest be the ties that bind". It was a favorite at the summer church camp in Fryeburg Maine which we used to attend when I was a child; the tune was also used with different words ("We're sorry you're going away...") at breakfast before campers' departures. I have always loved colored ribbons; "braiding" them into the ties that bind made an image I'm still thankful for. 

Ed, whom I had recently started dating, coached me through my first IRS long form with itemized deductions. Subsequently he became even more important; we married three years ago.

3. Ultimate Love Song

It was a 'relationships' column in a Morgantown West Virginia newspaper that formed the seed of this song; I worked it out while walking my German Shepherd on the WVU Law School hill.

4. Ordinary Person's Love Song

- was composed on I 95 between Boston MA and Augusta ME en route to my brother's. It comes out of one (of many) experience(s) of listening to too many pop love songs on the radio. Driving alone is a great opportunity for composing; I began carrying a tape recorder to capture tunes which might - like Charlie on the MTA - never return.

5. Laundry Day.

This is the third take on this song and much the best. I'm not sad I've lost the first one - so much saccharine, so many teardrops! A bit more backbone entered in the second try years later, and "Grandmother's rugs" was a splash of inspiration to turn the song (and the experience) around - but the tune still dragged. Then the bouncy tune came along (we were getting near recording time!) but I couldn't find a strum. Aha! I remembered a strum my brother taught me: a kind of down, down, up down continuous strum. (I learned it for some walking blues type western folk songs.) Whew! just time to work it out before the deadline.

6. Perspectives

For many years I spent parts of each summer in a (real but long decommissioned) Lighthouse on Cape Cod. The shoreline with pebbles is right out front; the kitchen window still shows the bubbles of old glass; planes still take off from the busy airport across the water; the dishwater (pumped by hand and heated on the gas stove) still grows quickly cool; the "hospital silver" episode was emergency surgery; the daffodils I owe to Dorothy Gilman's The Clairvoyant Countess. Although in my own experience the daffodils were metaphorical, what I've learned from these experiences is very real to me.

I realize - very ex post facto - that the underlying connection between these songs, my book on Homer, and my other book (Ordinary Oracles), is the practice of binocular vision. By that phrase I mean: looking at things from "Both Sides Now" (a favorite song from Judy Collins' records), of seeing opposites as also complementary halves of a larger whole (as Homer does), of wondering whether the glass if half-full or half-empty (as in "Telling Time").

7. Teaching

All true and experienced over and over for 30+ years.

8. How did you spend your summer?

Brought up to be maturely diffident about our accomplishments, Kenneth and I found it a delight to pull out all the stops in boasting our way through the first three verses. We didn't foresee the fourth verse, but when it came, we recognized it as the "true" answer to the "real" question.

9. "Snapshots"

was written in West Virginia, in the fall after the "tulip tree" walk with Rich, a former student.

"The newest installment in a story well known" stems from the familiar delight of discovering a new book in a series (e.g. Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series). After my parents died, one of the sharpest stings of their absence was coming across a new book by a mutually favorite author. "Oh! I must send this to….. Oh dear! I can't."

I never expected to find an ice cream soda in the middle of a semi-serious song but I enjoy its presence. And it's quite true: metaphors and images often serve me better for definitive understanding than conceptual language. Probably this fact is one reason I didn't major in any of the social sciences!

10. I Guess

Do you remember the "Poseidon Adventure" - either the movie or the novel? During the night before the ship disaster, the girl singer sings a song that starts "I guess there's got to be a morning after/ if we can hang on through the night…" I just reversed the idea, to make the night of singing the treasure one wants to hold on to. It was quite a while before I spotted the link in imagery between this song and "Sportscar Lady": "…and half the fun is finding different ways to rearrange….".

11. Piece of my heart

Room in my mind for this song was made when a friend played me a bluegrass revision of Janis Joplin's song: the original words but a different, rather perky tune. In Joplin's version, it's hard to hear the words of the verses; I was listening to the bluegrass version, not recognizing the song - and then the chorus broke on my ear. "Good heavens - it's that song?!"

Here too, I've reversed the original 'thrust' of the song in mood or tone, to wistful rather than drastic.

12. Don't Clutch

My brother, who started me on the guitar, used to say "Don't clutch!" in times of (my) stress; its brevity and reassurance made the phrase memorable. Driving back and forth over time, I got intrigued with how many contexts I could set the phrase in. And anyway, I wanted to write a song for him.

13. Hard-loving Time

Another dog-walking composition - this time beside a beach. Did I mention the juniper trees at the Lighthouse which help hold down the sand?

14. Joy

A major role-model for my teaching style was Kenneth (who co-authored "How did you spend your summer?") who is "leisurely about his scholarship and scholarly about his leisure". I respect and try to emulate, his holistic approach to life, bringing the same openness and attention and care to all aspects of life. Thus this song about teaching segues to relationships and on to 'world view' and back, trying to suggest the whole of which each (teaching, relationships, world view) may be a part.

15. Telling Time

A return to about the half-full, half-empty paradox. One of the first jokes I learned to tell was the old chestnut: "What is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?" Answer: "The optimist wakes up and says 'Good morning, God!' The pessimist wakes up and says "Good God! Morning!" In this song, my favorite line is "Child I used to change has children…", written with regard to my nephew.

This song also taught me the difference between what you can put in a printed poem and what you can do in a sung song. I would have liked to have the second verse read: 
"Grasses' tassels ring the tocsin;/
Swirl of swallows echoes. [full stop] Time /
Is the stream and we the ripples…."  
I liked the jerk of the new line starting before the end of the previous line… but I found that that line division just doesn't make itself clear when you're only listening to the words. 

-- A light in the window and a kettle on the stove.

from the 60's from the 80's from the '00s

 

Latest Release

Sportscar Lady with a Stationwagon Life is the debut solo album, by long-time singer/songwriter and Classics teacher, Jenny Hinckley. Named after the title cut, it offers mellow vocals, rich guitar, tunes that linger and unexpected lyrics - funny, beautiful, touching and (or) thought-provoking - for mostly universal moments in life.

Get the CD

Contact Jenny

Jenny's Song Service doesn't exist yet, but if/when it does - say, early in 2006 - you could request a song for your group's celebration or your sister's birthday... you'd fill out a questionnaire about the group or the person in question; you'd opt for a public domain tune or an original one; and.... you'd get a song for the occasion!

To contact Jenny please use this address: jenny@hinckley.com