"Never Expected Glow"

Ooh! I almost forgot... quick update on the Busstop18 track I was working on last week.

It's finished! And it's oh, so chill.

Swedish Producer jTa (Busstop 18 on Soundcloud) approached me a few weeks ago about this - and I knew immediately that I could write something appropriate to the melody and feel. I'm often inspired by titles and moods as they come to me, and this one was already titled "Never Expected Glow" (which I found charming in it's slightly not-traditional English semantics). So, I kept it, and wrote the rest of my lyric around it.

The only thing I knew about this song was that it "was inspired by a child".  OK.  I can do that.  I know that feeling. I have children. No problem. Wrote my lyric, recorded it, sent it off, he mixed it we critiqued it, he mixed it again...

And after he released it, he told me the story. This wasn't just about a child. This was about a little girl born with a hole in her heart. And somehow, what I'd written made sense.

But the beauty, here, is that it didn't surprise me in the slightest.

You see, my own son is a heart patient with Hypoplastic Left-Heart Syndrome. By the time he was two and half years old he'd had three open-heart surgeries. I KNOW what it's like to to worry over the hospital bed and wonder what the future will bring. I know the heartache when things look bleak, and I know the joy when all goes well.

I also how it feels to have 12 years distance between then and now. After all this time, I sometimes stop in my tracks and just look at my son in complete and utter wonder.  He's an amazing kid, even when you remove the medical miracles that brought us here.

So, it was Kismet that jTa asked me to do this. And Kismet that I did.




Never Expected Glow
jTa/McDuffie

Where did you come from?
Where do we go from here?
When all is said and done
Will you still be there?

I wasn't expecting
Where this would go
I wasn't looking for
This unexpected glow

How much longer
How much farther
How many days
How many years?

Where did you come from?
Where do we go from here?
When all is said and done
Will you still be there?