Editor’s Note: In March, Rhode Island singer-songwriter Sam Slick released his excellent new album After the Dream, Before the Memories – a stirring mix of Americana, folk, and rock. You can learn more about the release and single “Tumbleweeds” via SWT’s Singles Spotlight feature.
You can catch Sam Slick perform the new songs live at the following dates:
May 29th – The Golden Owl in New London, CT
May 30th – Providence Porchfest
June 5th – The Virgil Co-op in West Kingston, RI
June 6th – Therapy Coffee and RPM Records in Westerly, RI
July 11th – The Golden Owl in New London, CT
Today, we’re excited to share an Artist Essay Slick wrote about how his desert wanderings and the phrase “life’s too short” helped him shed past regrets and future anxieties, remain present, and find focus and creativity.
Our street slowly sloped up the hill to the South, where it ended at a fence bordering the national park. I was starting to sweat as I walked up, the heat remaining in the eighties as it had since around dawn. The fence still hadn’t been fixed so I had an easy time getting through to the park side. Maybe I’ll find some more coyotes, I hoped, or at least hear them serenade the hillside.
I followed the same unofficial trail of dusty footsteps I had taken quite often since moving to the desert two months before. The landscape looked totally alien – full of more life than you’d expect somewhere so hot and dry, but nothing resembled the verdant touches I had always lived around. Passing some sprawling creosote bushes, I started to hike up the short rocky point. From here I knew I could get a great view of the sun setting over the mountains to our West.
Waiting for the sun to roll down, I could feel the winds pick up. It always feels like the sun pushes the wind on its way down for the night, stirring the cholla skeletons and yucca fronds scattered below this little peak. I hadn’t been back East in some time, but the peaceful solitude out here allowed memories to make their way over to me as they wanted. This particular night I recalled a voicemail I received from my aunt a few years back. I hadn’t talked with her in a while, but I could still hear her message, kindly asking me to reconsider. There was somebody in my life I had decided shouldn’t be in my life anymore, and in her message my aunt had said ‘life’s too short,’ likely meaning life’s too short to hold grudges, but that phrase stuck with me.
Life’s too short. Maybe it is too short to hold grudges; sure, I can see where that feeling comes from. But life’s also too short to let things ride and accept what is wrong. The humility in forgiving every person who has harmed you is too much. I believe forgiveness is powerful and necessary and something I often choose, but hearing my aunt say ‘life’s too short’ made me realize that life is too short. Too short to bend over backwards to accommodate people who don’t really care about you, too short to work out how to make amends, and too short to wonder if it’s really worth trying to forget or accept that someone has purposefully done wrong to you.
I finally had a little phrase, one that had certainly become cliché in its usual use before tossing caution to the wind, that I could use to capture this feeling, this belief I had. This had to make it into a song. I trekked down the moon rocks, across the dusty slope, thru the fence, and down the hilly street back home. The cats were cozy in their usual living room spots while Julie was making curry for dinner. I cracked open a dollar store beer – a staple since we moved here – and grabbed my song notebook and pen. I caught up on my thoughts from sunset and had myself in a pretty good position to start writing the next day.
I was off of work the next day, not working again until the following nights. The hospital put me on night shifts for the time being, which gave me plenty of time at home to write new music. John Prine had just died a few days before, and while I can’t say I’ve always been some super fan who knows his whole catalogue, I definitely appreciate his towering status as a songwriter and admire the songs of his that I knew. One aspect of his musicianship I took note of was his effortless fingerpicking. I’ve never considered myself a good guitarist – to me it’s just a tool to write songs and accompany my singing – but I wish I had learned to fingerpick better. I tried to make a simple pattern, following three chords like many John Prine songs I had heard, and kept repeating it over and over. I couldn’t play fast, but the pace and rhythm was calm and captivating. The three chords were from an old song I wrote while in one of my first bands, but we never recorded it. It’s basically lost to time now but these three easy chords stuck with me.
After enough repetitions, I had that pattern down, and started to hum a melody as it came to me. I know my limits as a singer but wanted to press to try a little harder, so I threw in a quick hit of falsetto to take the lines a little higher and up the punch of each. I can’t remember if I had filler words or just syllables to save the spaces, but I started to work on lyrics pretty quickly. I usually don’t have a theme to my lyrics before I start writing, but this time was different – I’d have to work in reverse to build up to my realization about life being too short to forgive everything. The actual genesis of the thoughts wasn’t quite captivating in song form, so I decided to patch together a story. I pieced a few touches from my past together to tell one solid story – a few people at different times, in sometimes reversed perspectives, with the details stripped away could be molded into a single narrative. Some of the references are specific. I have a really reliable duffel bag I travel with often so I wanted to mention a duffel. Leonard Cohen could have been any artist’s name, but the syllables worked here, and I like what I’ve heard from him. Greylock? That was the street some of my friends had a house on in college and just after, where I spent a lot of time playing music and living life. Even if the narrative I crafted didn’t happen beat for beat in my life, it came from several chapters that did happen.
I had a story, and now for structure. The chorus had to break the hypnotic rhythm of the verses, but it does transition back nicely at the end so the next verse can return smoothly. I left room for a solo over a verse, which would feel like a cop-out of laziness but I don’t do it in every song so I figured it’s fine. Emotionally that oft-used structure works as a listener, and as long as I don’t do that every song, I feel like I’m putting in enough effort as a songwriter. I do need a little more dazzle in the writing to make it feel special, so I’m gonna add in a bridge after the solo to take it home. The rhythm breaks from the verse fingerpicking and I can hear the dynamics picking up. Here’s where the lyrics climb to their emotional height, the summit being ‘life’s too short to forgive’ before the music calms back down like it came in. And like that, the song’s together!
Being an artist without a label or rich family industry ties, it takes a long time to go from writing a song to recording it, and then a while before releasing it. I introduced the song to my band about two years later, after we had released the album we had started just before the pandemic hit, and after we built our chemistry. The band loved it at our first practice, and they immediately latched on with great ideas to make it sound better. Our drummer Dan made a really exciting part that definitely raised the energy throughout the song. Julian kept it bouncing on bass, and added some rich low harmonies. Jake is a tasteful guitarist and added nuance that I could have never written myself, plus a perfectly suited solo.
We had a recording session booked for a single, with the goal of cutting two songs in a day. The band wanted to record “Life’s Too Short”, but I had to save it for the next full length album, which I was hurrying to finish writing. By the time we entered Studio Red to record the album with Adam Lasus, we had been playing “Life’s Too Short” for almost two years, so we nailed our parts fast.
Jake also got to add some ooohs which he hadn’t been able to sing live, further enriching the vocal tapestry. We had added a keys player by this point, and Hannes recorded his part from his home in San Diego. I had always pictured pedal steel on top, so I sent the track to my friend Carlos Vargas, who dialed in the right flourishes to take the song over the top. We released it as the first single from the album, and it stands as one of our best songs we have ever recorded. All of that started from one sunset in the desert, looking back on a little fragment of memory.
You can connect with and listen to Sam Slick in the links in his author box below
Sam Slick
Contributor
Sam Slick is a Rhode Island based musician who plays Americana, folk and rock
