New
Happy Birthday Man!
May 16
by Lucas Raspe
I miss you every day
Thomas' Song
May 2
In January of this year, Mark called me and asked me if I could write a song about Thomas. I wonder what my response sounded like. I was unsure I was up to the task, but he caught me at a good time, as I had just started work on recording an album of original songs the previous week, so i was set up to record and was in a good rhythm of practice of playing and writing. I gave him a tentative, “I’ll give it a try,” but I was maybe being a little bit polite with that response. I didn’t think I would be able to write anything that would do what I would want it to adequately, as well as fit into what Mark and Elin wanted to hear.
I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote down a few notes. Mark said he wanted the line “in death, as in life, you continue to have an enormous impact on us” to be in the song, perhaps in the bridge. This sentence appears on Thomas’ memorial plaques on a bench in Colorado and in the Presbyterian Church of Los Gatos Memorial Garden. I figured this whole exercise would not be worth doing unless I could write something that I could imagine Tommy would have liked to listen to. I did not want to write anything cheesy or too sad. I wrote down “since the day that you played ‘Fast Car,’” “your light,” “bench,” and a few other things I thought might spark something on post-it notes and stuck them to the table. Mark and Elin wanted the song to be called “Thomas’ Song,” so I put that on another post-it and placed it above the others.
I picked up my guitar and strummed out a few chords while singing these ideas in various ways, and then i thought about how only a couple of weeks before this day, I had attended a church event for college aged students that Pastor Dave and Steve Fainer host each Christmastime. I remembered how great it was to connect with those young people who had just come home from college, and to catch up with them on what they had bee up to, but also the emptier and sadder feeling I had as I walked away and thought about Tommy. He should have been there too. I combined that experience with a memory of Tommy I had not thought about—a conversation we once had as summer was starting and he called it “pop punk season.”
I settled pretty quickly on a first verse and a chorus, recorded a quick iPhone voice memo to remember it, and went to take a shower and start my day. As I was letting the water heater do its thing, verse 2 came to me. Then the bridge (a clunkier version than what I wound up with, but still). I shut off the shower, went back to the guitar, played the whole thing through, wrote it all down and recorded a new full demo on my phone.
Later that day, I e-mailed Mark a copy of that demo and said, “I sat down with this for a bit and came up with this—If you and Elin like the shape of this, this is the route I’d like to go with the song.” I added a parenthetical subtitle at this point, giving the song the full title of “Thomas’ Song (Pop Punk Summertime).” Within an hour, Mark wrote back, “Elin and I just listened to it and we love it.”
I fully expected that I would change the song pretty significantly from that first version, but having just re-listened to it, all I did was play with some phrasing and solidify the bridge. Which means I wrote the whole song in what could not have been more than a half an hour. I don’t think that has ever happened before. I think I had been wanting to write this song for a long time and having been asked to do it allowed me to get it out.
I worked off and on over the next couple of months, recording, re-recording (I must have played the drums 27 different ways), adding instruments, deleting instruments, fixing and mixing and editing until it was finally finished on April 17.
It takes about 2 weeks after submitting it for a song to get published on Spotify/Apple Music/all the other streaming platforms. Which brings us to today, May 2, 2024. 3 years to the day since we lost Thomas. This seems like a poignant moment to reflect once again on a life that ended far too soon.
I present to you, “Thomas’ Song (Pop Punk Summertime).” Rest in peace, my friend.
https://songwhip.com/carlopanighetti/thomas-song-pop-punk-summertime
I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote down a few notes. Mark said he wanted the line “in death, as in life, you continue to have an enormous impact on us” to be in the song, perhaps in the bridge. This sentence appears on Thomas’ memorial plaques on a bench in Colorado and in the Presbyterian Church of Los Gatos Memorial Garden. I figured this whole exercise would not be worth doing unless I could write something that I could imagine Tommy would have liked to listen to. I did not want to write anything cheesy or too sad. I wrote down “since the day that you played ‘Fast Car,’” “your light,” “bench,” and a few other things I thought might spark something on post-it notes and stuck them to the table. Mark and Elin wanted the song to be called “Thomas’ Song,” so I put that on another post-it and placed it above the others.
I picked up my guitar and strummed out a few chords while singing these ideas in various ways, and then i thought about how only a couple of weeks before this day, I had attended a church event for college aged students that Pastor Dave and Steve Fainer host each Christmastime. I remembered how great it was to connect with those young people who had just come home from college, and to catch up with them on what they had bee up to, but also the emptier and sadder feeling I had as I walked away and thought about Tommy. He should have been there too. I combined that experience with a memory of Tommy I had not thought about—a conversation we once had as summer was starting and he called it “pop punk season.”
I settled pretty quickly on a first verse and a chorus, recorded a quick iPhone voice memo to remember it, and went to take a shower and start my day. As I was letting the water heater do its thing, verse 2 came to me. Then the bridge (a clunkier version than what I wound up with, but still). I shut off the shower, went back to the guitar, played the whole thing through, wrote it all down and recorded a new full demo on my phone.
Later that day, I e-mailed Mark a copy of that demo and said, “I sat down with this for a bit and came up with this—If you and Elin like the shape of this, this is the route I’d like to go with the song.” I added a parenthetical subtitle at this point, giving the song the full title of “Thomas’ Song (Pop Punk Summertime).” Within an hour, Mark wrote back, “Elin and I just listened to it and we love it.”
I fully expected that I would change the song pretty significantly from that first version, but having just re-listened to it, all I did was play with some phrasing and solidify the bridge. Which means I wrote the whole song in what could not have been more than a half an hour. I don’t think that has ever happened before. I think I had been wanting to write this song for a long time and having been asked to do it allowed me to get it out.
I worked off and on over the next couple of months, recording, re-recording (I must have played the drums 27 different ways), adding instruments, deleting instruments, fixing and mixing and editing until it was finally finished on April 17.
It takes about 2 weeks after submitting it for a song to get published on Spotify/Apple Music/all the other streaming platforms. Which brings us to today, May 2, 2024. 3 years to the day since we lost Thomas. This seems like a poignant moment to reflect once again on a life that ended far too soon.
I present to you, “Thomas’ Song (Pop Punk Summertime).” Rest in peace, my friend.
https://songwhip.com/carlopanighetti/thomas-song-pop-punk-summertime