Song For My Father

A Good Man He Is

He woke up early with the coffee still asleep,
Boots by the door, promises to keep.
I was just a wild thing, running through his halls,

Drawing little battle lines on bedroom walls.
He never said much, just nodded with a grin,
Carried all the weather so it wouldn’t blow in.

Hands like map lines, worn and rough and thin,
Holding up a roof I didn’t know I lived in.

I thought I raised myself from stone,
Thought I walked this road alone,
But every mile I claim as mine
Has his shadow in the spine.

A good man he is, not a saint, not a king,
Just a steady bit of mercy in an ordinary spring.
Did the best that he could with the days that he had,
Loved me through the foolish and the brave and the bad.
I couldn’t always see it, but I swear on what I’ve missed:
A good man he is, a good man he is.

I threw my words like bottles, broke them at his feet,
Wanted to be anywhere but on this street.
He just took the shards and swept them to the side,
Never once used them as a weapon on my pride.

Years turned bitter, I was drinking down the fire,
Calling every broken thing “my heart’s desire.”
But when the world went quiet and the bright lights failed,
He was still the number that my shaking fingers dialed.

I said, “I don’t know who I am,”
He said, “Son, I understand.
You don’t have to earn this home,
You just have to call it your own.”

Two nights back he called me, voice a little worn,
Said, “I added you to my plan, we’re sharing what I’ve stored.
Every song I’ve carried from the needle to the cloud,
Every hymn and highway tune that ever did me proud.

When you’re up too late and the dark feels strong,
You can walk my old roads in another man’s song.”
He didn’t say “I’m scared” or “I’m thinking ‘bout the end,”
He just opened up his library and called me son again.

I didn’t always thank him, didn’t always understand,
Thought the love of a father was a common, easy thing to have.
Now I see the quiet courage in the way he chose to stay,
How many storms he swallowed just to keep me on my way.

He’s not perfect, but he’s faithful,
And that weighs more than gold.
When the night is at its longest,
He’s the story I still hold.

I couldn’t always see it, but I swear on all of this:

A good man he is, a good man he is,
My father, my friend, a good man he is.

My Old Man Was A Doctor Of Sleep

My old man was a doctor of sleep,
Counting breaths in the hospital deep.
Green lights humming over quiet beds,
Hands on the line between living and dead.

Sometimes he’d take me to work for the day,
Let me watch the nurses move in their ballet.
He’d whisper, “This part, son, you don’t rise above,
You just show up steady and call it love.”

But I didn’t see a man, I saw a wall,
Something in the way of growing tall.
Rage in my chest like a loaded gun,
Waiting for the headlights that never come.

He held the sleep of strangers in the hollow of his hand,
But he never put me under, never turned me out to land.
Through the wreckage of my choices, through the worst I’d ever done,
He stayed and kept a light on for the sleep doctor’s son.
A good man he is, with a mind that came undone,
But he never stopped loving the sleep doctor’s son.

He said, “I quit at fifty-five or swallow lead,
I was one more call from a bullet in my head.”
Job overtook the work, the love all bled,
Charts and partners buzzing like flies ’round the bed.
He cut a deal, two weeks on, two off,
Sold the nights on call to the hungry young stock.
Then they changed the terms with a paper grin,
Said, “Come back full time or don’t come in.”

He looked at the hall that had eaten his days,
At the ghosts in his scrubs and the hospital haze,
Said, “If this is how you thank the work I’ve done,
Then I’m walking out into my own sun.”

He held the sleep of strangers in the hollow of his hand,
But he never put me under, never turned me out to land.
When the partners chose their money and they froze him one by one,
He chose a little wood dust and the laughter of his grandsons.
A good man he is, with a mind that came undone,
But he carved out room for the sleep doctor’s son.

He built a shop in the back of the yard,
Turned his shaking into labor, made the soft wood hard.
First came tables, shelves for the wall,
Then bowls on a lathe spinning smooth and small.
We joke in the kitchen when the years get rough,
Say the shop kept him living when the marriage got tough.
“The quality remains when the price is gone,”
That’s the creed from his mother that he passes on.

I was out getting lost in a chemical storm,
Breaking every promise just to feel warm.
My brother said, “Let him go, turn him loose to the street,
Let the hard road teach him what you can’t repeat.”
But my father shook his head, kept the porch light bright,
Picked me up from tennis, from school, from the night.
I cursed him for watching, for being too near,
Never saw that constancy was the cure for my fear.

We ate supper, not dinner, at the old oak table,
Every plate a truce, every chair a cable.
Phone would ring and he’d wave his hand,
Say, “We’re eating right now, they’ll understand.”
I used to choke on the quiet and the weight of that room,
Now I see it was shelter when my mind was a tomb.

He held the sleep of strangers in the hollow of his hand,
But he never put me under, never cast me from the land.
Through my needles and my nightmares, through the worst I’d ever done,
He refused to let the world have the sleep doctor’s son.

A good man he is, not a saint, not a king,
Just a tired kind of mercy with a stubborn wedding ring.
I hated him once, now the reckoning’s begun—
He’s the shade that keeps me standing,
I’m the sleep doctor’s son.

The Sleep Doctor's Kid Don't Sleep

Dad put half the town to sleep before the morning news,
Counting breaths and blood pressure in those paper shoes.
Steady hand on the needle, calm face under the light,
Tucked a hundred strangers in for surgery at night.

Then he’d drag back home like a worn-out saint,
Find me doing laps in the hall with a crayon and paint.
Mom waving little pink bottles like a holy writ,
Saying, “Doc, your son’s a case you can’t admit.”

He was Doctor Sleep, I was wired and lit,
He had the drugs, but they didn’t do shit.
Stacks of Benadryl with my name on the lid,
Didn’t touch the engine of that wide-awake kid.

He’d knock out a linebacker with a measured dose,
But his own boy’s brain just kept running close.
Yeah, the whole world snored when he closed their lids,
Except the sleep doctor’s wide-awake kid.

He’d say, “Son, normal folks are dreaming at two,”
I’d say, “Great, more sky, less traffic for me and you.”
He’d rub his eyes, mutter something ’bout charts,
I’d be in the kitchen building rockets out of Pop-Tart parts.

My brother Bob slept like a stone in a field,
I was up like a squirrel on a Ferris wheel.
Dad would grab his coffee like a hospital prop,
Mutter, “Kid, if you were my patient, I’d call for a swap.”

He was Doctor Sleep, I was wired and lit,
He had the drugs, but they didn’t do shit.
Stacks of Benadryl with my name on the lid,
Didn’t touch the engine of that wide-awake kid.

He could glide folks under with a whisper and a nod,
But I bounced off the ceiling like a prayer gone odd.
Yeah, the whole world snored when he closed their lids,
Except the sleep doctor’s wide-awake kid.

Then the job turned sour, partners turned cold,
He said, “I’m one more shift from a bullet in the skull.”
So he hung up the coat, walked out of the ward,
Traded beeping machines for a workbench board.

Started turning bowls on a humming lathe,
Making sawdust sermons in the backyard shade.
Mom didn’t kill him, ’cause the shop took the hit,
We all agreed that wood shavings saved our shit.

Now he putters with Elvis on the radio low,
Tells me ’bout a song called “I Am Woman,” like I didn’t know.
Adds me to his family plan with a careful thumb,
Says, “You got my whole library now, son, go have some fun.”

I laugh ’cause he still thinks I might fall asleep,
To the same old crooners he used to keep.
But it’s three a.m., and I’m wide-eyed still,
Streaming his old heroes on a high-speed thrill.

He was Doctor Sleep, I was wired and lit,
He had the drugs, but they never quite fit.
Stacks of Benadryl with my name on the lid,
Just made funny stories ’bout that hyper kid.

He retired from the OR before it took his head,
Found a second chance in the smell of cedar instead.
Now the whole world dozes when the day is done,
And I’m up late laughing, I’m the sleep doctor’s son.

Yeah, he spent his life putting other folks out,
While I stayed awake just pacing around.
But he never gave up, never closed my lid—

That’s the punchline, Dad:
You healed the wide-awake kid.

The Door You Didn't Close

I showed up wrecked in a borrowed skin,
eyes like glass, and the trouble living in.
A man can call it sickness,
a man can call it sin—
but you looked at me like a human being
before you looked at what I’d been.

I expected the gavel,
expected the shame,
expected the sentence
with my family name—
but you stayed where you were,
didn’t flinch, didn’t run.

You didn’t close the door.
You didn’t turn me out.
You didn’t make a sermon
out of what I couldn’t talk about.
You held the line like love can do—
quiet, stubborn, true.
And I don’t know how to repay it,
so I’m telling the truth:
you didn’t close the door.

When I was a kid I hated you—
not for what you were,
but for what I couldn’t see through.
I hated the rules, the tone, the way
you didn’t bend the world to make me okay.
I mistook your backbone
for a lack of heart.
I mistook your silence
for an empty part.

But time is a teacher with no soft hands—
it shows you the cost,
it shows you the man.
And now I can name what I couldn’t then:
you were trying to love me
without lying to me.

I don’t need you flawless.
I don’t need you myth.
I just need the record
to say what it is:
I was not easy.
I was not kind.
And you didn’t throw me away
like I deserved at the time.

You didn’t close the door.
You didn’t turn me out.
You didn’t make a sermon
out of what I couldn’t talk about.
You held the line like love can do—
quiet, stubborn, true.
So if this is my offering,
let it be the proof:
you didn’t close the door.

The Call

It was late enough the world went still,
late enough the mind quits spinning its will.
Phone lit up like a small blue moon,
and I knew before I answered the room.
Your voice was thinner than I’d like to hear,
but it was you—clean, present, clear.

No weather talk. No jokes for cover.
Just two men trying to speak like brothers.

And we talked clean.
No knives in the words.
No keeping score.
No needing to win.
Just breath and truth,
like a door left open.
Like mercy moving through.
That late-night call—
it didn’t fix it all,
but it made it real again.
And I’ll carry that,
I’ll carry that
like a light in my chest.

I said, “I’m sorry,” and I didn’t dress it up.
You didn’t punish me; you didn’t interrupt.
You said, “Son, I’m tired,” like a man can say
when pride finally stops blocking the way.
And all those years we couldn’t cross,
they fell quiet, like pennies in a box.

I heard your courage in the simplest line—
“Whatever comes, I’m glad you’re mine.”

You said, “If it gets worse…”
I said, “Say the word.”
You said, “Don’t wreck your life.”
I said, “This is my life.”
You laughed—just once—
and in that sound
I felt the old world soften.

And we talked clean.
No knives in the words.
No keeping score.
No needing to win.
Just breath and truth,
like a door left open.
Like mercy moving through.
That late-night call—
it didn’t fix it all,
but it made it real again.
So if the night comes heavy,
if you can’t sleep,
call me.
I’m here.
I’m in.

The Chair Beside The Bed

I don’t know how to fix the body,
don’t know how to bargain with time.
But I know how to show up
and let the quiet be mine.
There’s a chair beside the bed
that don’t need to say a thing—
just a witness in the room
while the night does what nights bring.

So I’ll sit right here,
I’ll stay near,
no speeches, no plans.
If you want my hand,
it’s already in my hands.
I can’t fight the dark for you,
but I can be the light it can’t move.
Just a chair beside the bed—
just love.

You carried so many people
through the edge of their sleep,
listening for the places
where the breath won’t keep.
Now the room is smaller,
and the clock is loud,
and I’m learning that devotion
can be quiet, not proud.

If you don’t want to talk, we won’t.
If you do, I won’t flinch.
If you’re scared, I’ll breathe with you
until the fear gets thin.
If the old hurts try to rise—
we’ll let them pass like rain.
We don’t have to solve the past
to keep faith with today.

Time Has A Way Of Turning The Light

You carried your hours like clean iron keys,
jangling quiet in the pocket of your jeans.
Hands that could comfort, hands that could stitch,
hands that could hold steady when the world went rich.
I watched you stand where the hard news lives,
and still come home with something left to give.

And I didn’t always know what I was seeing—
love in a uniform of staying busy.
But time has a way of turning the light,
so the simple things finally look right.

So here’s my song for my father—
not a trophy, not a pardon,
just a truth put down in sound:
you were steady when I wasn’t,
you were there when I was lost in it,
you kept the roof from coming down.
If I’ve got any good in my blood at all,
it learned your name before it learned to crawl.

I learned what “tired” means from the set of your jaw,
from the way you’d laugh like a man who’s seen it all.
From the calm you kept when the room turned loud,
from the mercy you showed without talking about.
Some men break easy, some men break mean—
you broke into service, you broke into clean.

And I’ve said some foolish things in my weather,
like a storm trying to call itself clever.
But I’m older now; I can finally tell:
you weren’t perfect—
you were real.

And I never asked the price you paid,
but I walk in the shade that you once made.
I never counted the nights you gave away,
but I’m counting them now, in a gentler way.
If forgiveness is a craft, not a speech—
then let me learn it,
let me reach.

I’m not singing to become a different man.
I’m singing to become an honest one.

So here’s my song for my father—
not a trophy, not a pardon,
just a truth put down in sound:
you were steady when I wasn’t,
you were there when I was lost in it,
you kept the roof from coming down.
And if I build anything that lasts at all,
it’ll be built in the shade you taught me to call home.

I Don't Know What To Do

I’m not there to hear the house at night,
not there to read your face in the dim lamp light.
I’m not there to pour the water,
not there to say, “I got it,” like it’s easy.
I’m here with distance in my hands,
and a heart that keeps rehearsing how to stand.

I keep thinking love should look like more—
but sometimes love is being ready,
waiting by the door.

And I don’t know what to do
except tell the truth:
I love you.
I don’t know what to say
that makes it lighter,
but I can get on a plane.
Just give the word,
and I’ll be wheels-up,
I’ll be headed your way.
I don’t know what to do—
so I’m staying ready.
That’s what I’ll do.

We’ve mended up the broken parts,
not perfect—just honest, heart to heart.
Old arguments don’t fit me now;
they feel like clothes from a smaller life.
If time is thinning where you are,
then let me spend mine right.

I can’t fight the body’s math,
can’t bargain down the dark—
but I can show up fast,
and I can stay.

If you want silence, I can hold it.
If you want laughter, I can try.
If you want company,
I won’t make it complicated—
I won’t make it about my pride.
I’ll bring my presence,
plain and true,
and sit with you
like sons are supposed to do.

And I don’t know what to do
except tell the truth:
I love you.
I don’t know what to say
that makes it lighter,
but I can get on a plane.
Just give the word—
Atlanta runway,
then the road you know by name.
I don’t know what to do—
so I’m staying ready.
That’s what I’ll do.

Porch Light Hop

1-2-3-4!
(“Hey!”)

Well I used to be a problem in boots,
all bark and bruise, and low-down roots,
but time put a mirror in my face—
and mercy taught me a better pace.
Now I don’t come talkin’ big or loud,
I come sayin’ “thanks” like I mean it proud.

’Cause we ain’t perfect, no, but we’re true—
and that’s a miracle comin’ through.

So turn it up, let the old floor shake—
we’re mended up for goodness’ sake!
If you give the word, I’m on my way,
wheels up, runway, same-day.
Atlanta to the home-road line,
then Columbus, baby—right on time.
Yeah, we got a little hurt to drop,
but tonight we do the porchlight hop!

You like your music with a backbone beat,
the kind that puts brave in a tired heartbeat.
And I like my truth without a disguise,
no fancy suit, no alibi.
We found a way to talk it clean,
like two grown men in between.

No more score, no more knives—
just the rest of our lives.

Hey now—listen—
I ain’t comin’ to fix the sky,
I’m comin’ to sit there by your side.
You say “Son,” I say “Dad,” and that’s enough—
two simple words, built outta love.
Then kick it back!

(“Well alright!”)
(quick twangy solo)

“Say the word, I’m gone!”
“Say the word, I’m home!”
(“Hey!”)

Song For My Father

Song For My Father | Narration

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This is not a nostalgia project.

It’s a correction.

For a long time, the file on my father in my head was simple:

-- good provider, bad presence, probable car-crash candidate.

I didn’t just dislike him. I waited for him to die.

In the bluntest, ugliest way: I thought the story would be easier if the phone rang one night and somebody said, “There was an accident.”

He worked too much. He was always around. He watched everything. He meddled. He had opinions about my hair, my friends, my speed, my drugs, my everything. He was the wall I bounced off of, over and over again. And because I was a smart, angry kid, I mistook that wall for malice instead of mercy.

🥷

I mistook that wall for malice instead of mercy.
I mistook that wall for malice instead of mercy.

Mercy With Teeth

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Mercy With Teeth

Mercy is not kindness
Mercy is not calm
Mercy is the hand
That breaks the wrong arm
Mercy is the boundary
You hit too late
Mercy doesn’t ask
Mercy shuts the gate

Mercy watched you circle
Mercy counted rounds
Mercy heard the lie
Before it made a sound
Mercy didn’t flinch
Didn’t blink or sway
Mercy waited
Then took your way

There’s a love that rots
And a grace that feeds
There’s a patience born of fear
And a patience that bleeds

Mercy with teeth
Tears the thread
Mercy with teeth
Names the dead
Mercy with teeth
Doesn’t pray
It ends the thing
That wouldn’t stay

Mercy isn’t soft
When the floor gives way
Mercy doesn’t hope
You’ll change someday
Mercy cuts clean
Mercy cuts true
Mercy takes the future
Out of you

Mercy saw the cost
And paid it now
Mercy broke the idol
At the brow
Mercy burned the map
Mercy closed the door
Mercy said:
“No more.”

If you call this cruel
You’re late
If you call this wrong
You hesitated
Mercy doesn’t wait
For consent
Mercy arrives
When time is spent

This is not forgiveness
This is enforcement
This is not love lost
This is love violent

Mercy with teeth
Leaves a mark
Mercy with teeth
Finds the dark
Mercy with teeth
Stands alone
So the innocent
Can make it home

When mercy stops asking
And starts to act
When love refuses
To take you back
That’s not hatred
That’s relief
That’s mercy
With teeth

Mercy With Teeth | Volume 2

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Mercy With Teeth | Volume 2 | Lyrics

Mercy With Teeth

Mercy with teeth does not arrive like a towel.

It arrives like a steady hand that will not let the wound be lied about.
It is gentle, but it is not soft.

It does not take pleasure in pain, but it refuses to purchase comfort by selling the truth.

Mercy with teeth is mercy that can bear weight.
It is mercy that survives consequence.
It is mercy that will not promise what it cannot deliver, and will not name what it cannot justify.

It speaks slower. Not because it is timid. Because it is responsible.
It says: this hurts. It says: it shouldn’t have happened. It says: the system failed here, and here, and here. It says: there are facts we can name, and there are facts we have not earned yet.

Mercy with teeth knows the difference.

It knows that grief wants a villain because grief is trying to restore order. It knows that anger wants a target because anger is trying to protect what remains. It knows that the mind wants closure because the mind cannot sleep inside an open loop.

Mercy with teeth does not shame those cravings.

It simply refuses to feed them with junk.
It offers something harder, and therefore more nourishing:
Witness.

Witness is the form of mercy that does not pretend to solve the pain. It stands beside it. It refuses to look away. It refuses to explain too early. It keeps the wound in view without turning it into spectacle.

Witness says: the loss is real.
Witness says: the body mattered.
Witness says: the story cannot be reduced without betraying the dead.
Mercy with teeth keeps faith with the dead by refusing to use them as props in someone else’s certainty performance.

That is what the teeth are for.
The teeth are for biting down on the urge to simplify.
The teeth are for resisting the sweet lie that would make everything feel clean.

The teeth are for holding a line when the room begs for a slogan.
Mercy with teeth is not mean. It is disciplined.
It is willing to say: stop.

Stop, not because questions are forbidden, but because answers require jurisdiction.
Stop, because language has downstream consequences and those consequences do not vanish just because the speaker was sincere.
Stop, because accusations become blood in the water.
Stop, because a person can be right about a failure and still wrong about the shape of reality that failure produced.

Mercy with teeth is mercy that refuses to let pain become a weapon.

It does not say: calm down.
It does not say: get over it.
It does not say: calm down.
It does not say: get over it.
It does not say: don’t be dramatic.
It says: do not let grief be stolen.
Because grief can be stolen.

It can be redirected into movements that need your body but do not care about your healing. It can be turned into clicks, into communities bonded by certainty, into identities built on permanent outrage. It can be made to serve someone else’s voice.

Mercy with teeth guards grief like a sacred thing.
It insists that grief deserves better than propaganda.
It insists that anger deserves better than a script.
It insists that the living deserve better than a story that trains them to distrust every accountable institution while trusting every unaccountable narrator.

Mercy with teeth is not pro-institution.
It is pro-accountability.

It does not worship systems.
It demands that systems speak like adults.
It demands that experts say where the edge of their competence is.
It demands that leaders admit error without turning admission into theater.
It demands that the language of care remain human.

And it demands that dissent remain tethered to standards.
Not to silence it, but to keep it honest.
Mercy with teeth is the refusal to accept “it feels true” as the final credential.
It is the insistence that presence is not proof.
It is the insistence that confidence is not jurisdiction.
It is the insistence that truth is not what calms the room, but what survives contact with correction.

Mercy with teeth can say: I don’t know yet.
And it can say it without collapsing.
That is a rare strength.

Mercy with teeth can also say: I was wrong.
And it can say it without dying of embarrassment.
Because embarrassment is not the enemy of truth. It is one of truth’s costs.
The person who cannot pay that cost will try to make someone else pay it.
Mercy with teeth will not do that.

Mercy with teeth is what remains when performance has been burned off.
It is what remains when the thrill of the takedown has faded.
It is what remains when the crowd goes home and the wounded are still wounded.

It is the mercy that stays.

It stays with the hard work: clarifying, correcting, revising, making amends, learning how to speak in a way that does not poison the shared air.
It stays with the slow rebuilding of jurisdiction: the right to speak and the obligation to be corrected.

It stays with the truth that some things cannot be explained cleanly, and that clean explanation is often just a lie wearing a lab coat.
Mercy with teeth does not offer a villain on demand.
It offers a practice.

It offers a vow:
Name what is true.
Refuse what is cheap.
Speak only what can bear weight.
And when the room begs for a clean story, be brave enough to keep the story honest.

That is the mercy that heals.
Not because it feels good.
Because it holds.

That’s the backdrop. That’s where this whole cycle starts—not with a Hallmark card, but with a death wish.

Now?

Now I see a different man standing in the same frame.

The shape of him didn’t change. The angle of my light did.

This record—Song For My Father—is me turning that light slowly, until the shadows move and the truth comes into view.

The Sleep Doctor

My dad was a sleep doctor. An anesthesiologist.

He spent his days on that thin line in the operating room—giving just enough poison to still the body, not enough to kill it. He held the sleep of strangers in his hands while saws and scalpels did their work. That’s not abstract to me; he took me to the hospital when I was old enough, walked me through the halls, and let me watch the ballet of nurses and machines.

There are two kinds of jobs in the world --

-- The kind where a mistake embarrasses you, and the kind where a mistake kills someone.

My father had the second kind. For decades.

At home, I didn’t see the weight of that. I just saw a man who was tired and in my business. I didn’t see the quiet math he was running: if I walk away from this kid, the way I want to walk away from everyone right now, what happens to him?

Later, much later, he told me the truth in a single, flat sentence:

“I retired at fifty-five because I was about to put a bullet in my head.”

That’s not a metaphor. That’s not a lyric line. That’s a doctor saying he’d had enough of playing God with syringes and ventilators and human fear.

The job ate the work. The calling went sour. The thing he had once loved—helping, healing, keeping people alive—turned into a grindstone pressing on whatever soft piece of him was left.

So he struck a bargain --

-- Two weeks on, two weeks off, sell his call nights to younger men who needed the money.

For a minute, it worked. Then the partners changed the rules.

A colleague retired. The others told him it was time to come back full-time or get out. You can hear the contempt right under the surface: We’re done accommodating your mind, old man. The machine needs you back on the wheel.

He said no.

A short word, but a big one when you’ve built your whole identity around being useful.

He walked away.

From the outside, thaappears to beke a comfortable early retirement.

From the inside, it was a man choosing not to die, but, who had to die, to who he was for so many years - his identity: He had to lay that down. For years, he would lament that simple fact - that he had lost who he was - that he loved the work, but the job came to eat him alive.

He would often retell his stories - his "spcheals" if you will. For one, that he would set his worried patients to ease with a little humor - and say something like: Well, I've done this a few times, so no worries - but, I've only done it on shaved pigs - so, I'll do like I've always done: Watch one, do one, teach one: I'm up to the "doing one" phase right now.

Here we go - and, with that, he would expertly throw a needle, a catheter into somebody's small vein on their hand, or start an epidural on a lady's back who is about to give birth.

He would smile at these stories. Eventually, the stories stopped. And, new things came to town - babies and the woodshop.

The Woodshop and the Babies

The question “and then do what?” is where a lot of men his age go to die slowly.

My dad went to the back yard.

He built a shop—literal boards, actual hammer, actual nails. I helped some, when I was working construction. At the time it was just another job site to me. Only later did it show up as what it really was: an exit ramp from oblivion.

He started with tables and shelves. Good solid work. Then he found the lathe. By the end he had three of them, turning bowls and shapes and little polished miracles out of raw chunks of wood.

We have a family creedo, from his mother, my grandmother:

“The quality remains after the price is forgotten.”

Sometimes he lived up to that in the shop. Sometimes he didn’t. That’s fine. The point isn’t that he made perfect heirlooms. The point is: the shop gave his hands somewhere to put the shaking, somewhere that wasn’t his own skull.

Around the same time, my kids arrived—Sophie and Thomas.

I believe, and we say this openly in the family, that if Sophie hadn’t come along when she did, my mother might not be alive. And if the woodshop hadn’t existed, my father might not be alive. Two small miracles: a baby and a room full of sharp spinning steel and sawdust. Somehow, between the two of them, they held the marriage and the man together.

That’s the version of my father that stands behind these songs --

-- the sleep doctor who walked away before he shot himself,

-- the woodworker who made bowls instead of pulling triggers,

-- the grandfather who let my children climb into a story that was safer than the one I grew up in.

Supper, Not Dinner

There’s another piece of his geometry that only makes sense now.

We didn’t eat “dinner” at my house. We ate supper.

My mother cooked. My father came home. We sat at the table.

Phones rang. Friends called. The outside world buzzed for attention.

His response was always the same:

“We are eating supper right now. I’ll call you back when we’re done.”

Or, to me:

“Tell your friend we’re eating. You can call him back later.”

As a kid, that felt like prison.

Why can’t I just take the call? Why is this boring, awkward table sacred?

Because it was all he had left, that’s why.

When the hospital owned his days and the on-call pager owned his nights, that one slice of time—supper—was his small act of refusal. The job could have his expertise. The partners could have his sleep. The phone could have every other hour.

But the table?

The table was his.

He guarded it clumsily, imperfectly, sometimes annoyingly. But he guarded it. I didn’t see that then. I just saw a man interrupting my social life.

Later, when the drugs had me and my life was the opposite of structured, he had every socially acceptable reason to cut me loose. My brother asked him more than once:

“Just put him out. Let him hit the street. Let the world do what it’s going to do.”

He didn’t.

He picked me up. From school. From tennis. From nowhere. From hell.

He kept a chair for me at that same supper table.

It wasn’t warm and fuzzy. This is not a Disney story. There were nights when the air at that table was so thick you could chew it. But I was there. And he didn’t lock the door.

That’s a kind of love I only understand now, when people my age are throwing their hands up and saying they can’t handle less than what he handled for years.

Refiling a Man

It’s one thing to say, “I forgive my father.” That phrase is cheap now, worn out from overuse in self-help books.

What’s harder—and what this project is actually about—is refiling him.

Taking him out of the “enemy” drawer and putting him somewhere more accurate:

not saint,
not monster,
but good man under impossible pressure who still refused to abandon me.

That’s what “A Good Man He Is” sings.

That’s what “The Sleep Doctor’s Son” confesses.

That’s what “Supper, Not Dinner” laughs about, just enough to let some air in.

These are not abstract meditations on fatherhood.

They’re case files on one man.

And that’s why the album title is singular: Song For My Father.

Not songs about some archetype.

One long song, broken into tracks, pointed at the same person.

Why Put This Out in Public

Some of this work could have stayed private.

I could have played these tracks in the car on the way to his house, handed him a USB drive, and called it done.

But part of honoring what he did is saying it out loud where others can hear it.

There are sons out there who will never get this far with their fathers.

There are fathers out there on the edge of their own bullet, wondering if it matters that they’re still picking their kids up from whatever metaphorical tennis court they’re lost on.

If anything in this cycle does its job, it will say two things:

To the fathers: It mattered that you stayed. Even when nobody thanked you. Even when they hated you for it.
To the sons and daughters: Look again. The man you filed as a villain might be the one who quietly saved your life more times than you can count.

I don’t owe my dad a rewrite of history.

I owe him the truth—finally told with all the pieces in the frame.

This is that truth, sung and spoken. – This is the Song For My Father.