First Person One of the big suggestions that Amy Speace had for my song I Was Here, during the performance workshop at NERFA that I previously blogged about , was that I change it to first person. (For those of you want the basics, here are the lyrics, with a video of me playing the song just after I wrote it.) I could see the logic of putting the song in first person – her whole performance workshop was about embodying the sentiment of the song, and it’s a lot easier to do that when you’re telling it as your own story. In fact, she had me change to first person while I was singing it, in the workshop. People, both during the workshop, and afterwards, responded really positively to the change, saying that it invited them in as listeners. But in the workshop we only worked with the first verse of the song, and when I left I did a lot of thinking about whether that change would really work. And I was concerned for a couple reasons. The first was that the first two verses were written about two different people, and I thought it might be confusing to be singing as two different people. Now, it turns out that just by happenstance (the people in both verses work in the evening), it’s not impossible that they could be the same person, but that runs into the second problem: whether there are perspectives in the song that don’t make sense as written in the first person. I was struggling with this issue and had more or less concluded that it wouldn’t really work to put it in the first person. But today I was telling Vance Gilbert about the performance workshop and about Amy’s suggestion, and we decided to think through what would make sense. We talked through the issues I mentioned above and looked through specific points of confusion to decide whether I did say anything that wouldn’t be said in that way if I changed the perspective. We decided that it was at least possible to put it in the first person. Vance mentioned the concern that “I” would be mentioned a lot that way, but that, conversely, there’s a lot of change of pronoun (he, she, I) if it is’t. Ultimately we decided to figure it out by giving each option a try – how did it actually sound when I played it? And that’s where I had the unexpected outcome. We decided that the way it was originally written works absolutely fine; it’s a great song. But when I sang it all the way through in the first person – something I hadn’t actually done before – something happened, and Vance and I both felt it. Remember my blog post about getting chills at the point in a song that is most meaningful to me, if I’ve performed it well? In this song, that place has, so far, been the line “a handprint placed in fresh cement.” This time, though, I got chills in the second verse. I felt it differently, and more, when I sang it in the first person. So I’m going to give it a try. I’ll play it Thursday night at Amazing Things this way. And more importantly, I’m making a quick demo recording of it, on Friday, and unless I have a crisis of confidence in the next thirty-six hours, I’ll record it first person. Stay tuned.