Somewhere between the Cat Stevens records and the career, the mortgage, the family — the dream got quietly filed away. You were going to write songs. Life had other plans, and the notebook waited.
Here's what I've learned working with writers who came back to music in their sixties and seventies: the songs don't expire. The melody you've hummed for forty years, the person who deserves more than a photo album, the street you grew up on in the language you grew up in — they're all still there, waiting to be written down.
The Legacy Songbook is where they get written down. Not a course. Not theory. A planner with the right questions:
- The Person Songs — for a parent, living or gone. For your children, your grandchildren, the one who stayed.
- The Place Songs — the kitchens, the coasts, the island, the home you left.
- The Era Songs — because your song can sound like your years: the folk confessional, the arena anthem, the bolero, the country tune.
- The Reckoning Songs — the hardest page, and the one everyone comes back to.
By the last page, you'll have something most people never get: the list. Your body of work, named. What happens to it after that — whether you write them yourself, or have them made real by professional hands — is a decision for later. The list comes first.