Song Inspiration, Lyric Development, Personal Meaning, Intended Message or Other Insights
I wrote the original lyrics to “One More Morning” in 2005, during one of the lowest periods of my life.
In late 2003, my oldest son passed away in an accident. Less than fourteen months later, I lost two lifelong friends and bandmates in unrelated tragedies. Between my son's passing and the deaths of my friends, I had also gone through a difficult divorce with the mother of my boys. That separation left me homeless.
After several weeks of sleeping in my car, a coworker offered to let me stay at his apartment. It was a small fifth-floor, one-bedroom apartment. The main living area and tiny kitchen shared the same space, with only one window. I slept on the couch.
To understand where I was emotionally, I also need to be open about something personal. I have since been diagnosed with bipolar depression. At that point in my life, I was deeply depressed and emotionally stuck. I couldn't find my way through the grief of three deaths that had completely changed my world, or reconcile everything I had lost through the separation.
The apartment window faced the sunrise over downtown Omaha. Just outside it was a small concrete ledge.
One morning, a few days after arriving there, I woke before sunrise and started a pot of coffee on the stove—the only place the coffee maker's short cord could reach the available kitchen outlet. For reasons I can't really explain, I climbed through the window and sat on the ledge.
My thoughts were consumed by everything that had happened during the previous fourteen months. But as I sat there, I also began noticing what was happening around me.
I watched the street below, the buildings across from me and the few people already walking the sidewalks. Occasionally, I could smell the fresh coffee drifting through the open window. Across the street, I could faintly make out a stray dog I had come to know in passing, sleeping nearby. As the sun began to rise, I could hear faint, upbeat music coming from somewhere inside the building.
Then something small and unexpected happened.
The sun was rising brightly, but a lone cloud overhead suddenly let down a brief shower. I could smell the rain hitting the dry concrete around me. For whatever reason, that smell broke through everything else going on in my mind.
It made me stop and actually notice where I was.
That moment became the turning point in the song as well. The lyrics begin that shift with the words, “but then I smell the rain on dry concrete.” It wasn't an image I created later for the song. It was the actual sensory moment that interrupted my thoughts and caused me to start noticing everything around me.
As the shower passed and the sun continued rising, its light began reflecting from the glass of the building across the street. I started thinking about how much worse things could have been. I had spent so much time consumed by everything I had lost that I had stopped recognizing anything I still had. I hadn't appreciated that a new friend had given me somewhere to sleep. I wasn't hungry. I was alive. I had family who cared about me, even though I hadn't reached out to them in months.
The smell of the rain and coffee, the sunrise, the distant music, the people beginning their day—even that stray dog that somehow never seemed to give up hope and was always friendly—started connecting in my mind.
For the first time since my son had passed, I felt myself becoming present in the moment.
Those small, ordinary and often overlooked things became the foundation of the lyrics to “One More Morning.” They helped pull me out of a place where grief had consumed almost every thought and reminded me that there was still something beyond what I had lost.
Life didn't suddenly become easy after that morning. But eventually I got myself back together. I sought better employment and got a place of my own. I even adopted that stray dog, who became my loyal companion for the next ten years.
Music was more complicated.
Although I had performed for most of my life, I didn't return to performing. I couldn't bring myself to sing songs I had co-written or performed with the friends I had lost. Even as I began processing everything that had happened, the music I was creating was dark, and I didn't like what I was hearing from myself.
The original music I composed for “One More Morning” reflected that period. The arrangement was melancholy, and so was my vocal delivery.
Years later, when I began going through my earlier work and deciding what I wanted to bring forward for this album, the lyrics to “One More Morning” struck me differently. I still believed in what they said, but I was no longer satisfied with how the music said it.
I didn't want the music merely to describe where I had been. I wanted it to acknowledge the victory of eventually finding my way out.
So I redesigned the song from the ground up. I recomposed its entire musical makeup while keeping the original main vocal lyrics I had written in 2005. I also completely rewrote the background vocals and vocal layers to support the feeling I wanted the new recording to carry.
The released version still recognizes the state of mind I was in when those words were written. But now the music also carries what I couldn't fully know while sitting on that ledge: that noticing the smallest blessings can sometimes open our eyes to possibilities we can't yet see.
For me, “One More Morning” isn't simply about surviving until another day.
It's about becoming part of that day again.
It's about recognizing what is still here instead of living only inside what can no longer be changed—and holding on to the belief that, no matter where we find ourselves today, something better could be just One More Morning away.
