North Star Writers Group

Surprised? Well, you should be. For the first 66-and-a-half years of my gig on Earth, I never thought about writing songs. I didn’t think about it because in the olden days you had to know a little something about music and poetry before you started cranking out tunes. But all that has changed.

I heard a song on the radio the other day and the lyrics went something like this: “You had a bad day/you had a bad day/you had a bad day/you had a bad day.”

There have been other changes, too.

For a long, long time, song lyrics rhymed. You know, love/dove, kiss/miss, see/me.

But now songwriters get away with “rhyming” guitar with, say, pickup truck and sweetheart with . . . um . . .river.

I guess it isn’t really that surprising that I want to write songs because I have something of a music background.

When I was in elementary school my dad enrolled me in accordion lessons.

“What’s an accordion?” I asked.

“You’ll find out,” he said.

And he was right. The night of my first lesson I found out the accordion was an instrument that weighed about as much as our 1948 Buick sedan.

As it turned out, playing the instrument wasn’t a problem for me. But lifting the instrument was a problem for me.

Three weeks into my lessons — my instructor had me lie on my back on the floor to play — dad withdrew me from the lessons, his dream of creating another Myron Floren shattered forever.

My next stint as a wannabe musician came when I was in the fifth grade and took piano lessons at Oak Street Elementary School.

We didn’t have a piano at home, so my music teachers gave me a cardboard keyboard to practice with.

The bad thing about this is that no music comes out of a cardboard piano.

I practiced every evening.

“How am I doing, Dad?” I asked after playing a tune by Chopin on my cardboard keyboard.

“Damned if I can tell,” he replied.

To make a long story much shorter, I endured and now at 66 — even though I still can’t carry a tune in a basket, as they say — I’m about to become a songwriter.

And, like I said before, the words don’t have to rhyme and the tune doesn’t even have to be a blockbuster tune to land on the charts these days.

I won’t say I’m enthusiastic, but last week I cleared some space on my bedroom wall for my first Grammy Award.

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