This past weekend, Willie Nelson won a grammy for his album called "A Beautiful Time," which also includes a song of the same name. Congratulations Willie! Well deserved.

Willie is one of my musical heroes, though I confess I haven't listened to everything he's done in recent years. I wasn't aware of "A Beautiful Time" until I heard about it winning the Grammy. 

As it turns out, I also have a song called "Beautiful Time" which I wrote in 2002. Like Willie's, it is also a country-ish waltz, though the similarities pretty much end there. 

Still, it seems like a pretty good jumping-off point for a blog about my musical creative process. Beautiful Time is perhaps the oldest song of mine that I consider to be still "In Progress."

I wrote it a few months after the 9/11 attacks. It isn't explicitly "about" those events in any way. Rather, it was more of an emotional response to the feeling of loss that 9/11 created.  

I had spent the previous five years basically traveling the world on a shoestring, playing in bands and acting in plays, meeting the love of my life, and, with her, doing basically whatever we wanted with our carefree young-adult lives. For me (and I'm sure for a lot of people who lived through the 90s), 9/11 felt like a watershed moment that closed the door on the life we lived before it. It made that carefree world feel sinister and dark.  

So that was the emotional moment that I was responding to. Still, I'm fundamentally an optimist and I wanted to give a message of positivity and hope. So I wrote this bittersweet song which lands on the line "this is a beautiful time to be around." My wife says it's her favorite song that I've ever written. 

Here, give it a listen: 

I'll have more to say about this song later. The version in this video is the first one that I recorded. It features me on guitar and vocals, with my dad, David Edwards, on the piano. The photo is one I took many years later, while living in Belgium.