From the album: Gifts and Testaments of Robin Hood Road

so’journ (so’jern) v.i. dwell temporarily. –n. a temporary stay.

This being the first ever complete song (music with lyrics) to come from my pen, I felt compelled to discuss its origins.

Most of my compositions have had humble beginnings but none more so than this. What turned out to be the chorus of the song was a simple melody I wrote in May of 1988 in a music practice room at Southeastern Louisiana University where I had received a Bachelor of Music 5 years earlier. I had just graduated with my second bachelor degree and was doodling on one of the pianos in the music department in between printing and mailing resumes to all corners of the country. I wrote this dumb little melody [one of many dozens I still have laying around] in B major and thought nothing of it until a month later while traveling between Fort Worth TX and south Louisiana to land my first job.

It’s 10 hours or so between the 2 destinations so I had a lot of quiet time to think and thus literally composed the skeleton of this song in my head during my relocation. I still have the original sketch that I wrote down on plain notebook paper once I landed two weeks later in North Texas. The title on that document says “Radio Love Song” which seemed appropriate at the time for a song written on the road with nothing to do except compose in my head and listen to the radio.

The song lay dormant for the bulk of the next 7 years though I did tinker with it on my guitar from time to time as I focused on establishing my computer-programming career. It took on a working title at one point of “10,000 Cranberry Sundays” because it came across to me at the time as something 10,000 Maniacs, The Cranberries and The Sundays might have collaborated on. I also imagined it being sung by any or a combination of the lead vocalists for these bands but it was still a song that I referred to also as “The song with no chorus”.

In late 1995, I realized that dumb little melody I had written 7 years ago was actually the chorus of the song and not just the intro. With that the song began to quickly take shape. I wrote a bridge for it that practically wrote itself and scribbled down a smattering of possibilities for lyrics none of which were relevant to the final concept of the song. The following year, the concept of the song was vivid when I found the final title. In early 1998, the lyrics were complete. Ten years nearly to the day, I completed programming the bulk of a demo of the song into a Yamaha QY20 sequencer.

Sojourn Love Song is about the relationships I’ve had with women in my first 37 years but it didn’t start that way. In 1995, I hit the darkest most lowest point of my computer–programming career. Thus, the lyrics for this song began in frustration from having to deal with the managerial structure I was under at the time. The first stanza is as much about my work situation as it is the controlling women I dated. One stanza does not coincide with the dictionary excerpt at the beginning of this document in that my relationship with my Mother has been anything but temporary. She continues to be a mentor, a mother and a best friend just as she has been all my life.

It would be impossible to represent all the women who have ever meant anything to me in these lyrics. Musically, only 2 ½ verses made sense for the song. Thus, regrettably, there is a long list of women both family and otherwise that I simply could not include either due to musical editing purposes or because they just did not pan out poetically.

Jon Charles Fortman 1998