Unless something changes in the remainder of my career as a songwriter, whatever legacy I leave behind will be largely defined by this song. There is no firm count, but I feel safe in saying that I have played this song more than any other that I have written. It’s a song that touches people every time I play it, even when they don’t know the story behind it.
It’s been two decades, almost exactly, since I put pen to paper one afternoon at our family’s dining room table and wrote this song in one sitting. I sat writing at one end and my daughter Maddie, who was not quite five at the time sat at the other end coloring away while her Dad played his guitar and made up songs. It was a beautiful summer afternoon.
We had only just moved in to the house a couple of weeks prior. It was our first house and we were so very excited. My parents had helped us, nee’ carried us, into getting that house.
It had been in our family for a very, very long time. No one was certain of the exact date, but my great-grandparents had moved into the house sometime in the early to mid-30s when my grandmother and great aunt were very small girls. Just like my own.
Grandpa George continued to live in that house until his death in 2002, despite losing his wife Myrtle 33 years earlier! Despite living to the ripe old age of 93, it was genuine shock to our family when he died suddenly in 2002. Please let me live to be that age and let it be a shock when I go.
After Grandpa Geo’s death, my parents approached my wife Kimmy and I to see if they could help us to buy the house and fix it up for out family. With tears in our eyes and slack jawed looks of shock, we said yes and set to work fixing it up, eventually moving in on July 20, 2003.
Grandpa Geo had split his time between the house in Grand Ledge where we now lived, and the family cabin just north of a little town called Remus. As much as I had memories of the house that now belongs to us, it was not the house that I thought of as belonging to Grandpa George.
Nearly all of the time that I had spent with Grandpa Geo was at the cabin. It was a family refuge, a nature outpost, a swimming hole and so much more. At the age of five while my mother was in graduate school, I spent the summer there with her and Grandpa Geo. She would drive the half hour in to campus each day or attend to her studies by the lake. Grandpa Geo and I would fish, hike, hunt for mushrooms, putter or nap.
Associating him more with the cabin than with the house that was now ours made it easier for us to turn it into our own home. As we renovated and updated the house on a humble DIY budget, I’d been thinking a great deal about making sure to keep the spirit of the house intact in some way.
It was important that I maintain a sense of reverence for the family that had been in what was now our own home. I was beginning to find a balance between making the place ours , but doing with that with a sense of honor.
The day that I wrote ‘Cabin By The Lake’ was one of the first weekends I can remember after we had finished the flurry of renovations and moving in. While I cannot recall whether it was a Saturday or Sunday, it was most certainly a weekend afternoon, and the breeze blew the white curtain in the dining room into my back as I sat at the table and strummed my guitar.
This was usually how I wrote songs at the time. I’d play around for a few minutes, find a chord progression or a melody and then either write new word, or go and find previous notes and see if they might match each other. After just a couple of minutes, a fully formed line came at the same moment at a G to C and back to G folk pattern. The next followed almost immediately, as my hand dropped to an E minor and kept going.
Words were coming too. In just minutes, I had a full verse, and then another with vocal melody and lyrics in fully finished formed. The chorus required a bit of nudging to keep it form design into something rather trite, but with a gentle massage, it rolled out easily and warmly.
I truly have no idea how long the process took, but in memory and soul it feels like minutes. It might have been a half hour, or an hour at the very most. It never felt like work and I was more antennae than inventor. On that afternoon, I was a scribe relaying thoughts and words from some other place. Maybe that is a place within me, maybe it is without. I am not sure it matters to me which it is.
It’s always an anxious and thrilling moment to play a new song all the way through for the first time. Once you feel that you have something nailed, there is a magical window where it holds a grain of impossibility; a sense that you have created something beautiful, but there is no way that it can last. This is too beautiful to have come from you.
As I finished my first full pass at the song, I knew it was great. This was in a completely different league than the songs I had written before. This had depth, and character, and truth. It felt much more like me reporting on someone else’s story than telling my own. Turns out, it was both.
The final chord rang out from the first full playing of the song and as I raised my head, I could see my nearly five year old daughter Maddie at the other end of our dining room table with her eyes full of tears.
I sat my guitar down and rushed to her side. Perhaps I had been so intently focused on my song I had missed her hurting herself in some way. But she wasn’t behaving as if there were any physical injury at all. She was just all teared up and trying to hold it back.
As I leaned over to pick her up, she sniffled, “Daddy, don’t play that song anymore. It makes me sad.”
“Ohhh sweetheart, I am sorry. It’s okay. I can be done with that song for now.”
I wiped the tears away. We snuck a cookie or two from the package on the kitchen counter and sat back down to color together. For a moment, I sat there stunned.
‘Cabin By The Lake’ perfectly told the story of my great-grandfather’s first summer at the family cabin without my great-grandmother. I had never known her. Myrtle died three years before my arrival. Yet, here I was with a brand new song about their first year apart. A house can't write a song on its own, but it can help like Hell.
‘Cabin By The Lake’ ended up being the centerpiece of a record by my band The Pantones, called Sleepless Nights, Silent Mornings. That album is largely based around the separation of a couple due to an untimely death. While it’s not a concept record it is a window into my family history, the ghosts that inhabit the family home, and the ache and loneliness of loss.
The record, and ‘Cabin’ specifically have taken on an entirely new meaning since the sudden loss of my Dad in the summer of 2020. Each line now works double time as it tells its original story and serves as metaphor for the massive hole left in the wake of Steven’s death.
There is simply no way I could have written this song, and made the Sleepless album, if we hadn't moved into the house where my family still live today. We’ve managed to make it our own while always keeping a piece of Grandpa Geo around too. This song is a piece of that house and this house is a piece of that song.
I’ll write more about the actual cabin in the near future. For now, enjoy this musical view.
Cheers,
Matty C
Sheddio Sessions #001 - 'Cabin By The Lake'