The fourth song of the Plant Songs project is called “Goodbye Minn. “ I recently listened to some of the 24 Standards recordings, and I thought it might be nice to write in the language of the Great American Songbook. I have not written a lot in that style in the past, although I meticulously arranged 24 Standards, so in that process I learned a lot about it. The harmonic language of those songs lends itself to a lot of chromatic embellishments. I’m not sure if it’s because of the nature of the harmony itself, or if it’s that the songs have been around awhile and have been worked over so much by jazz musicians that we’re used that kind of harmonic treatment - probably a little of both. So in “Goodbye Minn” I enjoyed playing around with that language, adding things like countermelodies and altered chords. I improvised the opening part of the song at a sound check at a wedding gig on Saturday, and again I used the voice memos application to document it in case it eluded me later on. Then I built the song around that opening idea. It was enjoyable to write - at times there were chords that took me awhile to find. Sometimes the right choice revealed itself a day later.
The melody of this song has a bit of repeated phrases in it. Often when I think about melody construction, I want to avoid too many exact repeats of phrases - that’s boring. However, in this case the harmony under the repeated phrases changes, which adds interest I think - maybe it’s even nice. Actually, one of my favorite Duke Ellington songs is “Sunset and the Mockingbird” which does this quite extensively, and it’s gosh darn gorgeous. So I’m going to take encouragement from that and enjoy the repeated phrases that came out in “Goodbye Minn”.
This time around it took awhile before I had a subject and title. I knew it was a sentimental sounding song, but there wasn’t anything jumping out to me for the first few days. Then I happened to watch a video of Robin Greenfield that got me focused on something. Robin is a real inspiring guy. Over the last 10 years, he’s systematically removed nearly all the things in his life that cause harm to life on earth, and done some really inspiring activism too, such as spending an entire year growing and foraging 100 percent of his food. Check him out. He’s currently walking from Canada to Los Angeles on the Pacific coast highway, and he’s been making some impromptu videos along the way. In the one I’m referring to, he found and owl that was killed by a car, and he decided to move it from the road to the forest so it could properly decompose and return to earth. It got me thinking a little about death and nutrient cycling. And I thought of our dog Minnie, who was with us from 2008 until 2022 and I decided to make this song about her. We used to call her ‘Minn’ for short. She was so special. And using “Minn” in the title allows a double meaning, since Minn is the old abbreviation for my state of origin, Minnesota. In four years from now, I will have lived half of my life in New York state, and if you count my time in college at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, I’ve now lived out of MN longer than I’ve lived in it, by quite a lot. I still go back there once or twice a year to visit family and it’s always sad to leave. I really loved growing up there and miss it a lot. So between saying goodbye to Minnie a couple years ago, and saying goodbye to Minnesota a couple times a year, I’ve got plenty of sentimental feelings to attach to this song. I hope you enjoy listening to “Goodbye Minn”.
Minnie and I visiting a swim hole in the Catskills in 2018.