Dave Carter has been my songwriting inspiration ever since I first heard his music. His songs span an unimaginably broad set of topics, and even if he found inspiration for them in his own life, the stories in them are anything but pedestrian. His melodies and arrangements (because everything is carefully planned out) are beyond compare, and his songs are perfectly calibrated to a wide range of styles, but for me what stands out is the lyrics. That’s partly because lyrics are the most important part of the song for me (I tend not to seek out instrumental music), and because there’s so much you can do with them if you write well. Nobody writes better than Dave. Some of his songs have fun with words (236-6132, The River Where She Sleeps; I mean, c’mon – the man rhymed “orange”), and most of them weave rhyme so seamlessly and intricately throughout the song that you don’t even know why you are carried so inexorably through it, or why everything fits so perfectly, because he doesn’t call attention to them. The song I think of as the most perfect example of songwriting is When I Go, and the internal rhymes in that song are the Sistine chapel of songwriting. Dave died nearly 10 years ago. In the couple years before he died I saw him play (with Tracy Grammer) more times than I can count; I would get myself to anywhere I could reach where they would be playing. There has been a lot of Dave’s music around since he died. Tracy is touring and goes through phases when her set is largely Dave Carter songs. And there was new music that came out in the years after he died. Tracy’s first solo CD was almost entirely unreleased Dave Carter songs, some – but not all or even most – I’d heard them do as a duo when he was alive. There was a CD they’d recorded (or re-recorded; it was originally his first solo CD, which I had) that was released with two new songs, after he died, and then a CD of Christmas songs they’d recorded for some other purpose when Dave was still alive that was brought out later. And I’ve had exposure to far more Dave Carter songs than are in the public Dave and Tracy repertoire; I’m close enough to the inner circle of Dave fans (and friends) that I’ve heard demo tapes of songs that were never formally recorded; I’ve heard Tracy play songs from deep in the catalog at late night festival campfires and the occasional tribute show. There area a lot of great unreleased Dave songs still out there. I probably can think, off the top of my head, of 10 of them that are not slated at this point for any particular public playing. I have a couple Dave songs I play regularly at home that almost no one has ever heard and they’re the equal of anything that has been officially released. And I bet there are another dozen that exist, completed, somewhere but that I don’t even know about, and that’s even apart from forgotten fragments on scraps of paper somewhere. My distant dream is that some day songwriters can be individually invited into the Dave Carter archive in the same way that they are to the Woody Guthrie archives. Imagine working with a piece of a song written by Dave Carter to complete it and introduce it to the world. So when I miss Dave it’s usually his songwriting I miss – unlike many songwriters, his songs, which started out pretty great, were continually getting better. He left behind a graduate course in songwriting, and I never tire of listening to, playing, and trying to understand his songs. Thursday night by luck of timing I was one of the first people able to buy the new Dave and Tracy CD, Little Blue Egg. It was made of demo recordings they did before Dave died, and that Tracy unearthed and cleaned up enough to release. Only two are new to me (although many will be new to all but the most hard-core Dave fans) and those aren’t the best on the disc. There are some great songs there – September Sea is a perfect duet, with counterpoint melody and lyrics; Better Way is achingly beautiful and sad; Three-Fingered Jack is great cowboy poetry (if cowboy poets wrote in 11/4 time). And some of ones Tracy has done her own versions of, like the song (Hard to Make It) from which the title comes, and Any Way I Do, are among the best Dave wrote. But what really struck me as we put the CD into the car stereo on the way back from the show was how much I’ve missed Dave’s voice. It almost brought me to tears to hear it in a new context. I hear and play his songs all the time, and absolutely love it when Tracy plays them. But Dave’s voice contains his character, his soul, and perfectly conveys those songs. And Dave and Tracy together, especially on a song like September Sea, reminds me why I fell in love with every part of their music way back when. It was like being reunited with an old and dear friend.