The Rockin' Rodents

Jerry the Songwriter

With his family on board, jerry could practice at home again. Jimmy lent him an acoustic guitar to save on the broken windows in the Lee household.

Jerry practiced the exercises and learned the songs for the band that Jimmy gave him. After a while, Jerry got bored of so much repetition and began to mess around.

He found three chords that he thought sounded nice together. Jimmy had explained how some scales and chords (which are kind of like the letters and words of music) had complimentary "brothers and sisters" as Jimmy saw them and you could use these to tease a little bit more out of a melody or chord progression.

Jerry found those brother and sister notes and chords and began to knit them together into the song. He rearranged them and tried them in different ways until he felt he had got it just the way he wanted it.

He played it one more time and felt a tingling euphoria as the tones and melodies meshed.

He realized it lacked something. Words, lyrics. He grabbed some pen and paper and began to try and write a song.

Ten minutes later he was still staring at a blank page.

"This isn't working," he said to himself. He went back to his guitar. He idly strummed through the melody one more time. It was melancholic. He didn't know why, it had just come out that way. He started to think about his dad and how hard it must have been to give up his life on the road and stop drinking.

Somehow all those thoughts came together and came out of Jerry in a melody. Bit by bit a story flowed from him and he began almost without thinking to hang sentences on the melody. When he had finished, he quickly jotted the words down in his notebook. Jerry had written his first song.