Eric Folkerth

You found the notes!
Welcome!

I grieve the loss of “liner notes” for a records. The ability to hold it in. your hand, find hidden gems and messages from a musician. The digital age has taken that from us.

But, here's an online version, that gives me the ability to resurrect this tradition…tell the story of this record got made, and my song inspirations.

 

Skip ahead to song discussion/lyrics by clicking the two links just below this.
Or, buckle up for the whole story, just below that.

Click HERE for the CD Liner Notes.

Song Lyrics Here.

“What took you so long?” 
I get that question a lot. Many people know I’ve been recording, playing, performing all these years, so why so many years between albums?


The incredible truth is some of these songs were recorded, mixed and mastered three times.

This is not a typo…and it’s quite a story…as I said, buckle up.

Soon after my first album was released (2001), I went right back to work with Clark Findley on a second project.
Clark had moved to a built-out studio over in Pleasant Grove (“Phattman Studios.” )
The work was slow. Mostly on my day’s off (Fridays), or when we could get musicians to come sit-in with us.

We worked hard for about a year there. About midway through, Clark got a job at “Alpha Omega Studios” in Fort Worth. He was hired as the B Studio Engineer, and moved his gear there. I don’t really remember much about it now, except that the A Studio engineer had a Grammy from an album with Eryka Badu.

That experience was truly seminal for me. To get to spend time watching Clark,  other artists and producers, in an actual studio…that gave me the lessons I'd later learn to open my own little shop.

We were just finishing up  (it’s now about 2004) when disaster struck. The studio filed for bankruptcy. All Clark’s gear, and all my songs, got padlocked by bankrupcy court, in a multi-year legal battle.

I can’t really describe how devastating this was. It was a deep gut punch. It felt like so much creative work has just vanished. And I had no idea what to do, or how long these tracks might be unavaiable. Clark didn’t either.  I waited for months, hoping for quick resolution. I fell into a deep depression. I gained a lot of weight. This creative loss felt insurmountable, deep, and possibly permanent.

Meanwhile, life was getting very busy. Dennise was running for judge. We were building a huge new church building (an exhausting, multi-year process) and I was trying to find time to be a good Dad too.

So, I set the whole project aside. With deep sadness and feeling as if I had no choice, I “put it on the shelf.”

I satiated my musical life by helping cofound “Connections,” our cover band for many years. That truly was a lifesaver as a musical outlet. It also deepened me as a performer. I learned to trust my voice with the band; and we pushed ourselves to do all sorts of genres of music I never would have exerienced just in my folk/acoustic music family.
But, truth be told, the band also took up all of the limited time I had to work on my own music.

I went into therapy for my depression. My psychiatrist pushed me to pick my music back up again. He urged me to consider that performing my own stuff, not just the cover band, was essential. He suggested my depression was it was situational, more than chronic. With better diet, exercise, prayer, self care and…MUSIC…I might wean myself off medication. I still remember the day we talked about the good habits that lead to good brain chemicals in most people.

And as part of that he said, for musicians, was playing and performing. So, he insistently told me: 

"Eric, you’ve got to play your music…” 

I will tell you: that changed my life and my health.  I resolved that, whatever else I did to make a living from then on, music that would help save my life. And I vowed to never foolishly put it down again.

So after about a five year absence, I started recording again.
This time, with some confidence from performing with the band, and the skills I'd learned in those other studios, I opened up: “Selfish Giant Studios.” 

The name comes from an Oscar Wilde children’s fable, “The Selfish Giant.”
I starred in a musical version of it in kindergarten.
Yes, there are pictures. (see the inside CD cover…)

The story is about a Giant who has a beautiful garden. But he gets angry at the damage children do (as they will) to his flowers and trees. So, he walls it off, and then goes away for the winter to visit a Giant friend.  
When he returns, he finds it’s Springtime everywhere…except in his garden, which is still snow covered and frozen. A small child (later revealed as a Christ figure) urges him to tear down the wall. Which he does. And Springtime returns.

It didn’t dawn on me for years, but this is the exact same storyline/metaphor of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” albeit in a kid-friendly, not teenaged angsty, package.
(But, it explains why I was obsessed with “The Wall” in late high school/early college…)

That metaphor— of tearing down the wall, and letting others in— has been one of the greatest spiritual truths that I learn/re-learn throughout my life. It's a root-level metaphor of my life.

I really have been…I really am…The Selfish Giant.

So, it’s now about 2010. And I’m working on these songs, again. Re-recording, re-tracking, for a second time. Complicated songs like “Walk With Me,” are getting and entirely NEW second take…every track you hear on this record, was done a second time.

Midway, I thought back to some of those original songs, and some priceless recordings that could never be replicated. Some of them were with Billy Jonas, who wasn't through town often to re-do them. Others were with Rachel Bissex, and therefore irreplacable.

So, I called Clark up.

Yes, he said, he had finally got everything back.

Yes, he said, all the original tracks were on a hard drive and I could come over and copy them.

So, I took over a thumb-drive and recovered the basic tracks for several songs.
But, I also said a permanent “goodbye” to several more. Because, this “second-second record” would be different from the “first-second record.”

New songs had been written, demanding my attention. Older ones didn’t feel as fresh, and fell off the list. So, with those recovered tracks and a batch of new songs…I found myself just about done for a second time.

And then…disaster struck…. again…

My computer, and back up disk, was literally stolen of my desk. A “smash and grab” of the laptop where I did all my work. I’d foolishly left it alone on the desk, all the way at the other end of our house, with all the other studio gear moved away. We were doing some kind of rennovation in the room, and I was disassembling everything. For reasons that escape me now, I left the laptop near temptingly near a window.

And so…and this is not a joke…for the SECOND TIME…an almost completely finished batch of songs was taken from me.  Depression again.  Not as deep as the first time. Instead, this time, revolve to keep going.  But, God, that was embarrassing. 

By this time, Maria was in high school. Soon, my Dad would be sick and dying. And real life would take me away from music again.  After my Dad died, I inherited his desktop computer, and for a THIRD TIME…I started recording, tracking, mixing and mastering.

So, yes…some of these songs really, truly have been recorded three times.

Retracked, remixed, rerecorded…THREE TIMES.
Not because I was overly obsessive, but because of this story I've just told of hard work, loss, hard work again, loss again.

So, now it’s the late 20-teens, and we’re moving back to the Log House. And right about 2019….I got everything finished for the THIRD time. (What I'm calling “the third-second record”)

I tell the preceding story for this reason: Although this seems like a second album to all of you, inside my experience, these songs you are hearing are like my “fourth” album.

We all know what happened in 2020. By my own choice, I didn’t want to release this project I’d worked on for this during the pandemic, only to have it  lost in grief or confusion.  The last delay, 2022, was a year where my Mom died. And frankly, I just needed a breather last year.

So now, we come to the end of this tortured story. And, finally, I am letting these songs go into the world.

I tell this long story because perhaps it helps you approximate the mixture of joy, wistfulness, satisfaction, and history that is deep within me at this very moment. Sure, every songwriter is excited when a new record comes out. But this work has been building for twenty years. This record is something of an archeological dig through my songwriting and recording, over this past 20 years; a chipping away back through those artistic layers.

Songs like “The Don’t Shop,” for example, come from the “first-second record.”
Other songs, like “Better The Higher You Climb” hail from the “second-second record.”
(But, were recorded/tracked twice)
 

And, finally, there are more recent songs —including the title track of this “third-second record”  that got written the past few years.

In the notes on each song, I'll list what “record” each song comes from, where it was recorded, so you can see how it all fits together.

Which leads me to say, this record really is my own “Rock Hammer To The Stone.”

It’s a labor of love of many years…of chipping away the stone…of having it roll back again…of chipping away more.

Given the stops, starts, delays and despairs….I seriously doubt any other record will ever mean quite so much, given the labor of love this has been. 

There is one more story I am thinking of this week, with the released of this album.

Perhap twenty years ago, in the midst of one of these delays I just described, I was at the Kerrville Folk Festival, lamenting the delays, worrying  the record would never be released, and likely manifesting some depression about it.

My dear friend, Melanie Schaffner, placed a $20 bill in my hand and said, 

"Eric, I want the first copy of that new record.”

Over all the years since, more than a decade now, I never forgot that kindness. When some of the lean years happened, remembering that I owed Melanie this record was part of the motivation that kept me going. 

Sadly, Melanie passed away after a shockingly short illness. Worse, it was mere weeks before the record was released.

Many of us “Camp Nashbill” friends are still grieving her loss. But, because I wanted to pay the debt, I sent the very first copy to her partner, Marc. Along with a note explaining this story….which he could not have known.

This was far too long a story to put in the physical liner notes. But I feel obligated to tell it here. So many friends like Mel have kept encouraging me to put out this record throughout all of these years. And I indebted to them all.

But I feel a special obligation to tell this story, and to be note my deep gratitude for the life, and the encourgement, of Melanie Schaffner.
 

On to the songs….the actual “notes” on the recordings/writing of each.

The Same Blood (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant Studios: Second Record)

This came from a songwriter group prompt.

The prompt was for the word, “Blood."  It was soon after the legalization of Same Sex Marriage, the chorus is meant to celebrate that. But I was hoping to capture the dangers of the “wedge issues” that are manipulated to divide us all.

I think the bridge really speaks a timeless truth:

“We can cling to differences that keep us all apart
Or choose to love the life that flows in every beating heart.”

The Natural Thing (lyrics)
(Alpha Omega: First/Second Record)
This song is dedicated to, and inspired by, Ben Marshall. Ben was my Youth Minister, and has been a lifelong mentor to me. His Sunday/Weekday classes are incredibly popular with many.

It was a throw-away line he said in a class one day. He said we were born for love, and that “love is the natural thing” for us. The whole thing tumbled out from that.

Thanks to Ben for being such a guide and mentor to me, and to so many.

For a time, Rick O’Connor, Bruce Hathaway, and me formed a little trio, and we played a few shows. Bruce sings the high harmonies, Rick plays congas and tenor backvox.

There’s a tasty bass part on this song that I really love. That’s from Kevin Moore.
Kevin was part of the legendary band out of 1980's Deep Ellum called, “End Over End." He and the band toured the world for a decade. 
But way before that, Kevin More was my childhood friend. We've known each other since we were five… one of the people I’ve known longest in the whole world. I'm even happier to have reconnected him more in recent years.

What a joy to have him play on this.
And that bass? I think it makes the whole song.

 

Better the Higher You Climb (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Second/Third Record)

This is something of a word-for-word retelling of a ten-year anniversary trip Dennise and I took. That year, and every ten years since, we head back to our original honeymoon area of Northern New Mexico.

It wasn’t a hard hike, but we were grossly out of shape, back then. We were huffing and puffing the whole way. And other hikers really did keep encouraging us, and urged us with that title line.

Now, it’s more than thirty years together…and the song is deeper, and more true to Dennise and me, than ever. I'm so grateful for her.

Rock Hammer To The Stone (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Third Record)

As said, this song became something of a metaphor for getting this record done, keeping true to the artistic task despite the obstacles. And of course, making it through those pandemic years too.


I’m such a fan of Stephen King’s “The Shawshank Redemption.” My favorite movie. The metaphor of chipping your way out of “your prison,” is borrowed from there.

It’s foolish, of course, believing that with only one tiny fleck of stone at a time, using a tiny little hammer, you can make any progress at all.  But, I'm now at an life-stage where I see the truth of how that really does sometimes work. At least, if anything good and permanent is going to change in the world and us, it's through showing up every day, and chipping away at the stone.

The trick is to keep breathing…keep believing.

A Time To Refrain
 (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Third Record)

A song from the pandemic years.

I know, it’s dated now.

I know, nobody wants to remember that time.

I just like it.

It’s catchy. So, it made the cut.

The Guilt That We Survive
 (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Third Record)


This song is a kind of a mirror-twin to “Rock Hammer,” and written about the same time.

Whereas that song looks back at the hard work it takes to make real progress and have success in life; this song is Lot's Wife looking back at all those who didn't make it.

It's half  “Survivor’s Guilt;” half “Imposter Syndrome.”
It was written before the peak of the pandemic, but certainly took one new, and horrific, meaning after that time. 

The older I get, the more I realize my own deeply angsty “imposter syndrom” and “survivors” guilt is actually not at all unique to me, or even to a small set of us humans.  If you’re a person with compassion and soul, you can’t help but eventually feel this, as friends, fall away. Sometimes, deeply. Throw in a dash of imposter syndrome, and it can take you a very wistful place.

My sense is that almost everybody who is successful (assuming: non-narcissists) has a sense of survivor guilt and imposter syndrome. This song tries to speak to the more universal sense of that I believe is actually quite common among many “successful” people.


Which is also to say: The idea that you succeeded from your own hard work alone, pulled yourself by your own bootstraps, is complete and utter bullshit.

Changing (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Second Record)

This song is my attempt to put forth the essence of “Process Theology,” or Panentheism, into a four-minute song.
That’s a ridiculous task, of course.

Process Thought suggest that everything —including God— is subject to the passage of time and change. Contrary to “absolute” definitions of God, God DOES change through time. But, like your own sense of “always being you,” some part of God also stays the same.

Thus, it is a true feeling that “God is always the same…”
 But, also true that, like  our bodies, minds, and the world itself, God is also always changing too.

Some folks —especially fundamentalists—find all these ideas challenging, or heretical, or usually both.

I find it’s the philosophical underpinnings that makes belief in God make sense. 

Charles Hartshorne said, “The future is always partially determined by the past.” 
Nothing is ever doomed to the past.

But nothing is ever a fully new creation, either.

Because the future is not fixed, because God works in and through every atom of existence, our own co-creation of the future is deeply important. Our daily choices are deeply important. How we treat ourselves, others, the planet.  Time again and we fail to see this.


And so, in every moment, the choice to “let love loose at last,” is still before us.

Walk With Me
 (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Second/Third Record)

This song was inspired by a picture taken by a member of my therapy group. He knew I loved to ride my bike around White Rock, and so he gifted me a picture of two friends, just sitting at a bench during the Golden Hour. The entire song fell out of meditating on that image.

The three verses are meant to mirror the beginning, middle, and end of a life-journey, through the metatphor of a lake walk.  I’m blessed to the two lake views that I get to see many times a year (White Rock at home, Callendar in East Texas) and I treasure the changing of the light during the golden and blue hours like no other time of day.


When I am gone from this earth, one way you can remember me fondly is to walk, ride, or sit, through those two hours, and marvel at just how much the light changes.
It’s a one-of-a-kind miracle, every day.

Ishmael and Isaac (lyrics)
(Alpha Omega: First Record)

This song is apparently tragically new in every age. Using the metaphor of Abraham’s sons from the Book of Genesis, it’s a lament to the ongoing struggle in “The Holy Land”/Palestine.  I wrote it during the Second Intifada. That shows you just how tragically long this struggle really is.

Tim McLemore added the piano parts. I added the background vocals years later.  There is no other instrumentation except the piano and guitar, and I really love how big the sounds it with just those two instruments.

Fun trivia. The Alpha Omega Studio piano was a full sized, pearl-white grand piano, that had formerly belong to the televangelist, Robert Tilton, before bankruptcy. This fact gave us two Methodist pastors great joy.


Tim was having a hard time in the studio understanding my vision for how this piano part should start slowly and quietly, but build throughout the song. So in the studio, I sat next to him on the piano bench and directed him through the recording. I think the result was beautiful.

I used to pick Tim up at the Kessler Park UMC parsonage to drive him over the Fort Worth for the recording sessions. Now, all these years later, I am the pastor there. (Crazy, right?)

Some might question my use of the line “This war cannot be won.” 

By this, I mean: Cannot be won, like a football game with one “team” blown off the field.
There must be a two state solution, or there really is no future for either people.


That is my view.  (Your mileage may vary)
Finally, don’t mistake what I’m doing/saying here, The line I am singing is not “Whoa,” like “Whoa, baby…”

But. “Woe” 

Like a Biblical sigh of lament for this human tragedy, and all the needless fighting, over a land that is less and less “holy” every year.

Your Full Height (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Third Record)

A previous mix of this song was released as a 2017 single. This song hail from that period of the first Trump Presidency, where it felt like I was going to a new protest against some new unjust horror, every week. We were on the streets a lot in those years. It was exhausting. 

The inspiration came from a line from my friend, John Thornburg; who was present at a sermon I delivered at the church we had both served.

I don’t even recall what the sermon was about now. Some social justice issue of that era.  Anyway, John came up afterwards and told me, “Eric you really stood up to your full height today…" 

As someone who has more self doubt than is likely evident to most of you, I treasured that compliment more than he could have known.
 And as the horrors of the The Trump years continued, I figured everyone needed that encouragement, and turned it into this song.

We’re now doing all this shit again. 
Let’s get ready to stand up, shine out, and raise our fists.

The One Thing That He Knows (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Third Record)

This song came out of a songwriter group prompt. The prompt was “Valentines Day.” Which kinda pissed me off, because I kinda hate Valentine’s Day “pressure.” The presure to, somehow, show love through….chocolates and a rose? That framing helped me see just how ridiculous the day really is. And the whole song tumbled out from there. It's a song that seems to mean a lot to folks.

I wrote an essay about the song and the kind of true love it speaks to some years back.
You can find it here.

The Don’t Shop (lyrics)
(Phattman Studios: First Record. Selfish Giant: Second Record)

This song has been a live-show favorite for years. Perhaps one of my best known, and oldest, songs. It was inspired by an actual place that, to this day, is still over here in East Dallas, on Live Oak Street. 
Dennise and me were driving by one day, and the “U” really had fallen off of a raised letter sign. I laughed out loud at the metphorical brilliance. (Meaning:  Both the missing “U” and the new word? You can make this stuff up…)

I have not seen my dear friend, Billy Jonas, for many years now. And I fear that is my fault. Billy is known for own humorous, brilliantly construted songs.

One trip when Billy was staying with us, we spent a long night in the studio, and he put down some of his classic “bangin’ and sangin.’”  
It was my idea to ask him to mimic the “voice inside your head” underneath the main lyrics. The background vocals were all him in the moment.

Some years later, in a different studio, Kevin Moore put down a very nice bass part.

Ten Minutes Ahead (lyrics)
(Phattman Studios: First Record. Selfish Giant: Second Record)

This song was inspired by a Type A church leader who was really annoying the hell of me. He was also equally annoyed by me: by my tardiness for meetings.

And so, he decided to lecture me with his advice that
“If you’re not ten minutes early, you’re late.” 

Let us be clear, Type A friends: Being 10 minutes early does not show resourcefulness on your part. It is also truly rude to the person you are meeting. 

Sure, being late is rude. But so is being early. There are whole masses of us who are not impressed with your supposed industriousness, but who instead see the demand to be “ahead of time” to be a flaw. 

John Wesley counseled us to neither spend more or less time at any one place. That's good advice. Try to be on time. But more than this, just be where you are.
Don't worry so much about the freaking clock. 

I was grumbling about this lecture my head, as I drove out to East Texas to do the Memorial Service for my Great Aunt. When she died, she had become  the great matriarch of our family.

She’d lived life the fullest, drunk hard, cussed, alot…and she never gave a shit about being on time once in her life.

The whole song fell out on that trip, and my fantasy about what all that “saved time” eventually leads to, anyway.

Lay It Down (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Third Record)

This is a song about the emotional “Cold War” my Father and I engaged in for years. He truly was a man of obsessive logic, and I have always been drawn to feelings and intuition. Our careers (engineering for him, ministry/music for me) kind of sum it up.

But he was also true “Cold Warrior” too. A Goldwater Republican. A “peace through strength” defense contractor, who ended up with a hippy, peace-march loving, Son.

Our particular “Cold War” was an inability to ever talk politics. Or, anything very deep at all, really. I always wanted to find a way “in,” behind that staid, logic facade. But I never did.

And then, he was dying of an incurable disease; and so, the words remained unsaid, and the “Cold War” followed us into death.

But among his papers, were his wishes for his funeral. So, as a pastor, it fell to me to decipher them.

His request for a final hymn at his Memorial: The classic peace movement song, “Down By The Riverside.”

The communist-fighting, Goldwater Republican; wanted to sing an anthem popularized by redlisted, socialist, folk singer, Pete Seeger.

I wept.

Who had my Father been, really?
And why had I never known this about him?
He had apparently been much deeper than I’d ever known. 

The song resolves as being about the “burdens” we don’t lay down…sometimes until after somebody dies. 

As Leaves Fall (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Third Record)

A simple acoustic interlude near the end. This record ended up rocking out much more than I expected. That’s just how the songs came out. But, man, do I love the acoustic guitar. And I wanted a breather to just let my Santa Cruz shine.
I love Fall so much now, much more than I used to, and try to appreciate it. This song is about that.

Thanks (lyrics)
(Selfish Giant: Second/Third Record)

I can’t really explain this. But when I wrote this song, I heard it in my head exactly like this track with all the instruments, drums, guitars…the whole thing. I got a final release-track that satisfyingly gets close to what was hearing that day of creation.

This song is my attempt at a season of gratitude…

starting with simple gratitudes of nature…
moving to gratitudes for friends, for social justice Christians and other heathen friends, for family….
and finally, gratitude for life and death itself.

The great mystic, Meister Eckhardt, gave the inspiration, through is incredible line about prayer: 

“If the only prayer you ever prayed in your life was ‘Thanks,’ it would be enough.”

This is my attempt at being enough.

So, in that gratitude, I am so grateful for the chance to let these song go, for the opportunity to do this creative work…I give my final thanks to God, to the songs…to you.

—30—