2026 October 18
“Am I going to be okay?”
My wife and I heard that question repeatedly while caring for her father and my mother during the final months of their lives. They died four months apart. For much of that time, we were their caregivers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
It would be fair to say that, for the most part, none of the four of us was having a particularly good time.
During the final two weeks of each of their lives, the question became a familiar refrain.
“Am I going to be okay?”
My answer was always yes.
The truth, of course, was more complicated.
If the question concerned what followed death, the answer depended on personal beliefs. Someone who believes in God and heaven might reasonably find reassurance in the promise of an afterlife. Someone without those beliefs might have a very different understanding. No one knows definitively what, if anything, comes next.
But if the question concerned what was happening to their bodies, the answer was painfully clear. They were dying. They were not going to recover.
They knew they were seriously ill. What they wanted from us, I came to believe, was something other than a medical assessment.
They wanted comfort.
That presented an unexpected problem for our family. All four of us were engineers: my mother, my father-in-law, my wife, and me. We had spent our lives learning to observe, analyze, question assumptions, and trust evidence. Science wasn’t simply something we believed in. It was fundamental to how we understood the world.
How do you set that aside when someone you love is dying?
How do you reconcile what you know with what they need to hear?
I had been raised to believe that honesty was straightforward. You told the truth. You didn’t lie. Ironically, one of the people who taught me those principles was now asking a question that made them considerably harder to apply.
I couldn’t change what was happening. Modern medicine could relieve suffering, and love could provide comfort, but neither could reverse the inevitable.
What I could do was answer the question in the way I believed it was being asked.
Yes. You’re going to be okay.
I wasn’t trying to change the medical facts. I was trying to provide reassurance in circumstances where the facts offered very little.
Not everyone has agreed with that decision. People have questioned whether it was right to say something reassuring when the reality was so different.
My response has always been the same.
You weren’t there.
I don’t believe there’s a universal rule for these situations. Every person is different. Every relationship is different. The right answer for one family may be entirely wrong for another.
But the experience changed something fundamental in me. I still believe in honesty, and I still tell the truth. I simply listen more carefully now for the question beneath the question.
Sometimes what someone needs from an answer is not another fact.
That realization eventually became a song called “Little Lies.”
But first, it became a story.
Before the First Note
Most of my songs begin with a short story, usually between one and five pages. I write it before composing a melody, choosing a groove, or settling on an arrangement.
There’s a reason for that sequence.
Music is seductive. A beautiful chord progression, a compelling melody, or an irresistible groove can convince me that an idea is worth pursuing long before I’ve determined whether there’s anything meaningful behind it.
A story is less forgiving.
It requires me to establish the emotional facts, the concrete details, the contradictions, and the narrative tension. I need to understand what happened, why it matters, and what remains unresolved.
I usually write the story as an email to myself. There’s nothing especially romantic about the method. Email is immediate, conversational, searchable, and automatically dated. It allows me to write without worrying about literary polish, and it gives me a record I can return to later.
Occasionally, an idea arrives almost fully formed when I wake up, with much of the music and lyrics already present. When that happens, I capture it immediately. But those moments are exceptions.
More often, a song begins with something I’ve read, heard, witnessed, or experienced that I can’t quite put aside.
During 2023, I wrote the story that would become “Little Lies” for the Ankh Live project, using the voice of a character named Shelly “Traction” Jones.
The story drew on the experiences my wife and I had endured while caring for our parents in 2022.
At its center was a question I still couldn’t answer in any universal way: Is it ever acceptable to tell someone you love something that isn’t entirely true if doing so provides comfort that the literal truth cannot?
I wasn’t interested in writing a moral argument. I wanted to understand the emotional contradiction.
Writing the story gave me a way to examine it before the music began influencing how I felt about it.
Once the story was finished, I could begin looking for the song inside it.
When Words Become Music
I start by extracting the lines, images, and ideas that seem capable of carrying the story musically.
Some become lyrical hooks. Others suggest a working title, a verse, or the emotional center of a chorus. Often, the central idea also points toward a musical genre: a particular rhythmic feel, harmonic language, or sonic atmosphere.
Sometimes I decide on a genre before writing the lyrics. In those cases, the musical framework influences the phrasing and development of the hooks. But more often, the story suggests the music.
For “Little Lies,” the central idea produced both the title and the chorus:
Give her lies, the sweet deception.
Give her lies, believe her perception.
The second line is especially important.
“Believe her perception” doesn’t mean rejecting science or pretending that medical facts have changed. It means making the effort to inhabit another person’s experience so completely that, for the purpose of comforting them, their perception becomes more important than your impulse to correct it.
For four engineers, that was not an easy adjustment.
We were accustomed to solving problems by identifying what was true. But dying isn’t an engineering problem that can always be solved. There comes a point when the objective changes from fixing what is wrong to helping someone live with what cannot be fixed.
The song needed to hold those conflicting ideas without becoming a lecture.
The verses remember the joyful times, the lives that existed before illness came to dominate them. The chorus confronts the uncomfortable question of what we say when the people we love need reassurance that we cannot guarantee.
Musically, I wanted the happiness and sadness to coexist, sometimes in ways that might feel almost jarring.
That became one of the song’s central challenges.
Once I have the essential lyrical hooks, I move into my digital audio workstation. Sometimes I begin with a melody on piano or guitar. Other times I start with bass and drums, allowing a groove to suggest the shape of the vocal line.
I record everything, including the false starts.
Then I begin testing the relationship between the words and the music. Does the melody give the important line enough weight? Does the groove leave room for the narrative? Does the chorus communicate the emotional conflict, or does it merely repeat the words?
A good story doesn’t automatically produce a good song.
In fact, I generally have to write four songs for every one that survives the process.
One of my recurring problems is that I overthink lyrics. I can become so concerned with preserving the narrative that I write far too many words. The result may be coherent on the page but sound more like spoken-word poetry than something a singer, or an audience, can comfortably sing.
Music imposes demands that prose does not.
Syllables have to fit. Stresses need to fall naturally. A phrase must work not only as language but as rhythm, melody, and breath.
I often begin with a guideline of six to nine syllables per line, although I abandon it whenever the music or emotional content demands something different. I also prepare alternative lines, or alts, that preserve the meaning while making the words easier to sing.
Sometimes the alternative is better precisely because it says less.
There’s a well-known story about the creation of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.”
It’s a useful reminder that words have musical properties independent of their definitions.
A lyric can be intellectually precise and musically lifeless. A handful of syllables that mean almost nothing on paper can communicate something immediately and powerfully when sung.
For someone who begins with a carefully constructed story, that can be a difficult lesson.
The story is the foundation, but it cannot become a prison.
The Hardest Part
The most difficult section of “Little Lies” was the outro.
The verses remembered the good times. The chorus addressed the question of reassurance and deception. But neither could provide the ending the song needed.
The outro had to say goodbye.
I slowed the tempo from 110 beats per minute to 90. The change allowed the music to move into a different emotional space, one that could carry the weight of the final farewell.
I also did something that runs against my natural tendency to explain things.
I used very few words.
For nearly a minute, the outro unfolds around three short lines:
Sweeten her life, with small deceptions
Sweeten her life, no more questions
Sweeten her life
That’s essentially all the lyric needed to say.
The music had to carry the rest.
Writing and recording that section was harder than anything else in the song. I wanted it to acknowledge the finality of what had happened without becoming overwhelmingly sad. I wanted the music to retain some sense of the love and happiness that existed before the illness.
And I wanted the ending to recognize something I hadn’t fully understood when I began writing.
“Am I going to be okay?” wasn’t only a question our parents had asked.
It was also a question that would eventually belong to us.
During their final months, weeks, days, and hours, our parents weren’t going to recover. Their beliefs about what followed death offered a different kind of reassurance, one that existed beyond the limits of medicine.
But after they died, my wife and I were left with our own uncertainty.
Would we be okay?
The outro needed to hold both questions at once.
Its sparse lyrics weren’t an absence of meaning. They were an acknowledgment that the music could express something I couldn’t find enough words to say.
The Songs That Don’t Survive
Once the essential melody, groove, and lyrical structure are working, I expand the arrangement into a complete song. I determine where the introduction, verses, choruses, bridges, instrumental breaks, and outro belong.
Then I record a rough demo, singing and playing the song myself.
The demo isn’t intended to be the finished performance. It establishes the musical direction and provides a reference for the musicians who will eventually record the final tracks.
I also prepare a detailed song chart.
The chart combines conventional musical notation with a timeline based on measure numbers and recording timecode. It identifies instrumental entrances and exits, vocal phrasing, arrangement changes, and other details that help musicians understand the song.
Everything lives in one document, accompanied by demo mixes with and without vocals.
It may seem like an excessive amount of preparation for something as emotional and intuitive as music. But I’ve found that the more clearly I communicate the structure, the more freedom musicians have to concentrate on their performances.
Preparation reduces confusion. It doesn’t have to eliminate spontaneity.
Before committing to the final recordings, however, I edit ruthlessly.
Lyrics that seemed indispensable in the original story may prove unnecessary in the song. Instrumental passages that sounded wonderful in isolation may obscure the vocal. A bridge may explain something the listener already understands.
Those elements have to go.
Sometimes the entire song has to go.
Some completed stories never produce convincing music. Some nearly finished songs ultimately fail. Others contain a terrific chorus or instrumental passage surrounded by material that simply doesn’t work.
Those pieces go into what I call the vault.
The vault is where unfinished ideas, abandoned arrangements, and songs unlikely ever to be released are stored. Most will probably never see the light of day. But occasionally, a chorus or musical idea from one abandoned song finds its way into another.
I don’t regard that as a failure of the process.
It’s part of the process.
The objective isn’t to prove that every story deserves to become a song. It’s to discover which stories can survive the transformation.
From a Private Story to a Global Collaboration
For years, my recording process depended on gathering people in a studio.
Before COVID, vocal sessions typically included the singer, the recording engineer, me, and someone capturing behind-the-scenes video. Musicians received detailed charts and demos well before the session, and we worked together in the same physical space.
The pandemic changed that.
Suddenly, everyone was recording from home studios. We used Zoom for video communication and Audiomovers for high-quality audio monitoring. Initially, the arrangement was clunky. There were technical problems, unfamiliar routines, and a learning curve for everyone involved.
But we became good at it.
More importantly, I realized that geography no longer had to determine whom I worked with.
Today, my collaborators include drummers in California and Colorado, guitarists in Detroit and Italy, horn players in Australia, string musicians in California and England, and mixing and mastering engineers across the United States and Europe.
The arrangement varies by song. I generally record my own bass, guitar, piano, organ, and synthesizer parts, while bringing in specialists for drums, vocals, strings, horns, guitar solos, and other performances that benefit from their expertise.
What began as a necessity became a preferred way of working.
The standardized chart system proved especially useful. Musicians in different countries could work from the same musical reference without needing to interpret a collection of contradictory instructions.
But the greatest benefit wasn’t logistical.
It was artistic.
Every musician brought something of themselves to the recording. The song might have originated in my experiences, but the finished performance was no longer mine alone.
That realization became especially important during the mixing of “Little Lies.”
The Sound I Couldn’t Find
I worked with four excellent mixers on “Little Lies.”
Each brought thoughtful ideas and considerable skill to the recording. Each approached the material with a different sensibility.
And none of them produced exactly what I was hearing in my head.
The problem wasn’t that the mixes were technically inadequate. It was that the song contained an emotional contradiction that was extraordinarily difficult to communicate.
I wanted happiness and sadness to coexist.
The lyrics could move abruptly between joyful memories and the uncomfortable realities of dying. The music needed to accommodate those changes without making the song unpleasant or exhausting to hear.
Too much emphasis on sadness risked overwhelming the listener. Too much brightness risked trivializing the subject.
I was searching for a balance that I could imagine but couldn’t adequately explain.
For a while, I assumed the solution was to keep refining the mixes until someone found the sound I was hearing internally.
Eventually, I recognized the flaw in that assumption.
Everyone responds to illness, death, grief, and loss through the lens of their own experiences. What one person hears as comforting, another may hear as sentimental. What sounds restrained to one listener may sound emotionally distant to another.
Why should any of the mixers hear “Little Lies” exactly as I did?
The song had been born from my family’s experience. But once it entered the world, other people inevitably brought their own experiences to it.
I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to hear a perfect reproduction of the sound I had imagined.
Instead, I needed to trust the mixer whose interpretation came closest to the emotional truth I was trying to communicate.
That required letting go.
It’s an interesting contradiction. I begin with a carefully written story. I construct detailed charts. I specify phrasing, instrumentation, entrances, exits, and arrangement decisions. I prepare musicians weeks in advance.
I do all of that because I believe preparation matters.
Yet the final stage of “Little Lies” required me to acknowledge that preparation has limits.
I could communicate the story. I could explain what the music meant to me. I could make countless technical decisions.
What I couldn’t do was make another person experience the song exactly as I had.
And perhaps I shouldn’t have wanted to.
What Remains
My mother’s final question came during the last few minutes of her life.
“Am I going to be okay?”
As I had so many times before, I answered yes.
Then she said, “I love you.”
And, “It’s beautiful.”
I don’t know what she was experiencing in those moments. I wouldn’t presume to explain it through science, religion, or anything else.
Those were her words.
I remember them.
When I began writing “Little Lies,” I thought I was exploring a question about honesty. Was it ever acceptable to tell someone you love something that wasn’t entirely true if doing so provided comfort that the literal truth could not?
I still believe honesty matters. I haven’t abandoned the principles my parents taught me. But I listen more carefully now, particularly when someone asks a question whose literal meaning may be less important than the reassurance they’re seeking.
I try to understand what they need from the answer.
That doesn’t mean every difficult truth should be avoided, or that one person should always decide what another can bear to hear. These are intensely personal decisions, shaped by the individual, the circumstances, and the relationship.
I made the decisions I believed were right for the people I loved.
Someone who wasn’t there may see things differently.
I can live with that.
Writing “Little Lies” brought me some comfort. Perhaps as much comfort as writing a song about those experiences could reasonably provide.
But it didn’t resolve the grief.
You don’t get over the death of someone you love. You learn to live with it. I try to remember the good days, the times before illness and caregiving came to dominate our lives.
And I know something now that I didn’t fully appreciate when I began the song.
No amount of writing can change what happened.
I can spend months shaping a story, finding the right lyrics, adjusting melodies, recording instruments, and searching for a mix that captures what I hear in my head. I can construct an ending that expresses everything I understand about loss.
But I cannot write my way out of it.
The song doesn’t solve anything.
It simply gives the experience a form I can return to.
Near the end of “Little Lies,” the tempo slows. The lyrics become sparse. The music takes over, carrying the final goodbye for nearly a minute.
Sweeten her life.
Three words, and then the music has to say the rest.
Our parents asked whether they were going to be okay.
We did what we could to comfort them.
After they died, the question remained.
Now it belonged to us.
And unlike the question they asked, this one is still being answered.
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