Harrison Public Library

The anniversary song nobody else could have written

For our fiftieth, I wanted to give Margaret something that did not come from a store. The idea arrived from a friend whose daughter works in advertising, and I will pass it to you the way it came to me. You can have a song made. There are programs now, some built into the big chat services, some standalone, where you describe the music you want and it creates it, lyrics, melody, a sung recording, in whatever style you name. I told it everything. Fifty years, the meeting at the church dance in 1975, the Buick Skylark, the kitchen fire of 1981 that we still laugh about, her patience, my stubbornness, and I asked for it in the style of a slow country waltz, the kind they played at that dance, with room for her name in the chorus. The first version was corny. The second forgot the Skylark. The fifth one, after an evening of adjustments that felt like directing a very patient band, was ours. Two minutes and forty seconds, sung by a voice that does not exist, about a life that does. She cried, the daughters cried, the grandkids demanded it be played again. Was it cheating, having a machine help. The memories were mine, the details were mine, the arguing about the chorus was mine. The machine held the instruments. There is a craft in knowing what you want to say, and fifty years had taught me that part, and it turned out the saying could be borrowed. Not everyone will want this. For the ones who do, it is sitting there, in the free tiers mostly, waiting for your details.

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