David A. Collins, 1956 - ?  

 Like anyone else, I’m a product of my parents and my upbringing.  

My father came from Oklahoma and money. He was an engineer and an entrepreneur. He started six manufacturing companies in his lifetime. The first two went broke, one was sold, and the other three were eventually combined into a single entity that I now (2012) run. The successful companies were all devoted to the manufacture of metal stampings. As an engineer, he did a number of things with metal that could have been patented – Dad just preferred to keep them as trade secrets. So far as I know, two of them have not been done by any other company.  

Mom & Dad met at Purdue University, where Mom took honors in math while working full time to pay her way through school. Mom got a patent of her own while working her first job out of college. It may be coincidence, but Mom was involved with all four of the successful companies - the two that went broke fizzled before she and Dad got together.  

 

Music:  

I never studied music, but when I was maybe eight or nine I discovered Dad’s old reel to reel tape recorder up in the attic. Just for perspective, as I write in 2012, that’s SIX generations of hardware ago (more, depending on how many generations of I-Pod you include, of course). He set me up with an amplifier, a speaker and a bunch of his old tapes of classical music and I listened for hours. While I would often listen for a while after school, I seldom forgot to put a tape on at bedtime. My favorite was a compilation with Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Copeland and others. I discovered that turning the volume down would cut most of the static hiss from the old tapes, so I learned to listen with the volume so low I could barely hear the sound from my bed – about five feet away. Not only was the music much clearer, but it forced me to actually listen.  

Once I started driving and got a job, I added another half hour a day or so of top 40 to the mix, and eventually I added a record player to my bedroom sound system. Now I could choose between Brahms & Beethoven or Simon & Garfunkel for my bedtime music.  

I even listened to a pair of Yodeling records after work for a year or two in my late teens. Partially because I did kind of like them, but also because the yodeling seemed to really annoy my sisters. Because of this, I listened in the living room on the good record player.  

Over the years, I listened to literally thousands of hours of music. I suppose the real point is that I rarely played music in the background. Most of the time, no matter what music was playing, I was listening. And what I heard - stayed with me.  

  

Words:  

Mom taught me to read, sometimes with the various kids books, often with the Sunday Comics page. None of her kids were ever less than two years above grade level in reading. Then, when I was around ten, one of my sisters left a book in the car after a trip. I picked it up . . . and discovered Science Fiction.  

That was all it took. I was, and am, a reader. I turned into that annoying person who turned in a list of ninety-one books when the seventh grade teacher asked us what we read over summer vacation. During High School teachers regularly took away my books so I couldn't read them in class. Listening to music was half an hour or so when I came home from school or work, plus another hour while the tape ran at bedtime. Reading was double that, and more on the weekends. Science Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy, Pulp Fiction, Adventure, Thriller. Asimov, Heinlein, Clark, Christie, Sayers, Queen and others.  

I counted my books when I packed them up to move in 1988, just after I got married. I don’t remember the exact number, but it was over 11,000 books, mostly paperback novels. I had read them all, most of them twice.  

And because of all that reading, I learned how to use words. Perhaps as importantly, I learned how not to use them.  

  

Singing:  

First: It should be noted that, while I did learn to sing, and actually sang quite a bit, I only ended up with a decent amateur singing voice. Better than most people who sing in the shower, but still not professional by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, the sound booth guys can cut five or six recordings together, use the best parts of each, and really kick it up a notch or two.  

Second: Mom didn’t just teach me to read, she taught me to sing, too:  

  

Monica Collins, 09/16/1919 – 12/30/2008  

When I was a boy, my parents had a summer house by a lake about one and a half, maybe two hours drive away from home.  

Mom taught us to sing as a way to keep some semblance of order in the car as we drove back and forth each weekend. We spent anywhere from 30 minutes up to the full two hours each way singing. Hymns, folk songs, show tunes . . . and Girl Scout songs. All four of my sisters went through Girl Scouts, and Mom was a troop leader, so I probably know more Girl Scout songs from the 1960s than any other male on the planet.  

Eventually, scar tissue from a tonsillectomy made her voice squeak in the upper portions of her range. She rarely sang afterwards.  

Nevertheless, she brought up four girls and a boy who all have reasonable singing voices. Not to mention a deep appreciation for music.  

  

Composition:  

For me, lyrics came first. There is a type of composition that puts new words to an existing tune. In some circles (the ones I frequented in my twenties), these are called “Filk Songs”. My first Filk was a collaboration with my sisters one day while the family was going to the lake house. We wrote “I’m Going to Leave the Dairy Queen” to the tune of “I'm Going to Leave Old Texas Now”, in a successful attempt to convince Dad to stop for ice cream. I think I was around nine or ten at the time. So far as I know the words were never recorded, and so the song is lost.  

In college I got into war gaming, and over the next ten years either wrote or co-wrote the lyrics to another twenty or so gaming Filks.  

Writing a complete song - both words and music - didn’t happen until I wrote “Heart of My Love” for my wife for our tenth anniversary in 1998. Since then, the songs have come to me roughly one every two or three years or so on average. I guess it’s a good thing composing isn’t my day job. 

   

The songs  

Each of these songs has been inspired by someone or something. Sometimes I had an idea of what I wanted to say when I started the song, other times not. Some almost seemed to write themselves, two of them took years to finish.  

I started the songs in this order:  

  

Heart of My Love  

Thank You God  

Praise Prayer Grace  

Mansions in the Sky  (in the works)

Before We Even Ask

With All You’re Going Through  

I Stand in the Word  

Shining Eyes  (in the works)

Christmas Time  

  

I hope you enjoy listening. 

David Alan Collins  

Last update March, 2020