possibilities…

It was 4:00 am and, at the tail end of a recording project, I was desperate for a title track. I had already named the CD, “be that as it may.” Whimsical? Yes. Obtuse? Perhaps. But it was exactly the title that had reverberated in my head for months. That was what it was to be. However, I only had one more day of recording left both on the clock and on the dollar. I was frantic.

Then, a “chance” look across the table of my producer’s kitchen helicoptered my eyes to a picture. It was an image that would provide the muse from which the title song was about to come…in the space of 20 minutes. A solitary figure of a girl, not quite a woman. A girl longing for womanhood. She looks pensively, a little fearfully, into an attic mirror afraid of what she might see; of what she might not see. She is a girl yearning for something else, something yet to come, just like she whose mirror it was in front of which she now sat might have thought years before.

The print spoke more than I could possibly write. It haunts me to this day. The following is the lyric from the song she inspired (and is downloadable on iTunes, by way of shameless plug).

be that as it may

Words & Music by Robert Rife

©10/16/98

Like roses hung from cellar walls,

Hints of words unspoken fall –

Suggestions of the fragrant fall,

Be that as it may.