Here's another original song that has been kicking around for a while: "Daddy Gotta Take That Toy Away." I recently started adding open-mic-style "live" videos to my YouTube channel, so this is me playing the song in my basement:

I wrote this song after my oldest son got big enough to crawl. I became painfully aware, as most new parents do, that every electrical outlet, every sharpened pencil, really every graspable object had suddenly become a potential agent of mischief, death, or both.

In fact I have a really distinct memory of the moment when I first came up with the chorus. I was chasing him up and down the hall in our very tiny house, confiscating one pointed and/or fragile object after another, and I starting singing to myself "Daddy gotta take that toy away, daddy gotta take that toy away..."

The rest of the song was born out of my parental brain taking this idea to its logical (?) extreme. What if baby getting ahold of the matchbook is the first step in a chain reaction that just gets worse and worse?

This song feels very "finished" to me from a writing standpoint, but I have never made a "finished" recording of it that I wanted to release. That's homework for myself as a home studio producer. I wrote the song on guitar and it has a kind of squirrel-nut-zippers throwback swing sound. I think it would also work as a barbershop quartet, and I might record it that way one of these days.