My recently released 5-song EP, Open Your Eyes, was originally supposed to just be an old-school single with an A-side featuring the full version of my FediVision 2024 entry “Open Your Eyes” and a B-side featuring a more acoustic, reflective take on my FediVision 2023 entry “Life’s in the Balance” that was always going to come out in late May or early June. But then something happened in late April.
I was cleaning up my hard drive and stumbled onto an MP3 of a song from 2023 that had the same title of a song I started writing in the late 1980s when I was 17 years old — “Why Is It So Hard?” Sure enough, it turned out I apparently worked on an updated version of the song last year and had completely forgotten about it. It was, and remains, a simple song built around and on top of a 4-bar, 4-chord synth loop. But there is something about it that has always resonated with me.
And this new version had a musical vibe that I just couldn’t shake despite the fact the lyrics were written from the POV of a teenager at the Jersey Shore about dumb high school stuff. I decided to just go with it instead of writing all new lyrics. In fact, I never really had lyrics for the second verse so I had to write new ones to fit with the rest of the song. While that verse sounds like I’m looking back as an adult (“why is it so hard…to go back to yesterday”), it’s really my 17-year-old self wanting to go back to a simpler time before high school drama kicked in.
With the song now completed after nearly 40 years, I decided to release it as part of the “Open Your Eyes” single, which was really now a 3-song EP. About a week or two later, WXPN in Philadelphia announced a 24-hour song challenge for June 1. I wound up writing “Beyond Forever” as a warmup for that contest and “Summer’s Not My Thing” as my actual submission. Both songs were added to the track listing and that’s how a simple single became my 5-song EP, Open Your Eyes, which is available to stream/download here.
I also wanted to share a video demonstrating the evolution of “Why Is It So Hard?” from that rough demo in 1988/89 to how it sounds today. I remember recording a cleaner demo with the vocals in the late 80s, but I used different instruments than the original and it actually turned out rather lame when I thought I was making it better. Anyway, I can’t find that second demo so I can only use the original instrumental demo and the 2024 EP version here.
And here is a lyric visualizer I put together for the Open Your Eyes EP version of “Why Is It So Hard?”
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