In 2010, Texas songwriter Fletcher Clark produced and released on Armadillo Records a collection of twelve of his songs by twelve different artists. Like a big song swap, he branded it TAKING TURNS. As much as folks enjoyed the songs and the production, friends and fans told him they wanted to hear him present his own songs - which he has since been doing live at select venues and festivals. As other pathways opened up, in 2015 he created Flécha3 Music to record and release the CD Open Up the Doors, twelve songs taken from my my musical ministry and published in my Personal Hymnal. In 2017, I recorded and released the CD SONGS OF SUSANNA, a collection of twelve original songs based on Texas history, centered around my epic ballad about Messenger of the Alamo Susanna Dickinson, There Must Be a Good Man in Texas. Now in 2018, Fletcher is releasing MY TURN (building on the brand, and recycling the artwork of gifted pal Guy Juke!). Withthe era of physical product in the form of vinyl, cassettes and then CDs closing, soon we will be vending/distributing only digitally. So only enough CD's have been produced for merch at gigs, and otherwise MY TURN is otherwise available for digital purchase and download through cdbaby.com (as are the other products).

So here are the songs and Fletcher's thoughts on them.

1. Sleepy Parade Co-written with my departed partner Jack Jacobs from our Texas show band Balcones Fault, a West Coast pop recording of the song was never released. The context keeps coming around, making it seem ever topical.
2. Distracted Driving (Drives Me Crazy) Driving some Wounded Warriors to Big Bend to camp, I began fretting about the apparent lack of focus of the drivers around us. So I handed out four legal pads and each Warrior wrote down his list of driving irritants. I already had the refrain, and they supplied the verses!
3. Cup of Hope (for a Fool) At the Kerrville Folk Festival, I was reflecting one evening on an upcoming reunion with a life-long friend, imagining how I might share the twisted path I had wandered to arrive at the moment. Certainly, there was some subsequent word-smithing and tune-smithing to follow, but the essence of the song was right there and then.
4. How Long Have You Waited (to Leave Me?) The subtitle for this song, in pure Texas twang, could be don’t let the screen door hit you on the butt on your way out, written for one of my exes. I was raised on that good ole Texas Swing!
5. Old Times Ain’t No More O tempora, O mores, watching a changing world not always to my liking. Still the loss of some cotton acreage to a newly constructed toll road contrasted bleakly with the rose-colored romanticizing of the good old days of Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. Hence, the verses and the refrain.
6. Sweet Cajun Queen I realized that as I put this collection together, I had not included a waltz, and that just didn’t seem right. My first wife was a lovely woman whose family was from Lafayette, LA, and I fell into an imaginary reverie as to how we might have met. I (In reality, I was playing on the Armadillo stage and she was right down front in the crowd.) I don’t allow my dreams to displace my memories, merely to lend a wistful ‘road not taken’ quality to them. Then again, as my old friend Maynard Tangedahl said, “If I’d stayed there then, I wouldn’t be here now.”
7. Watch Out for the Boogey Man Refrain and melody languishing for some time, I finished it at a friends’ ranch on the Lavaca River. They weren’t home when I arrived, but had left a guitar sitting out on the porch. I pulled up a chair under a large oak that overlooked a broad pasture, and the verses came popping out.
8. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Poor man’s subjunctive mood, also the future damn-near-perfect tense so common to delusional songwriters. Everyone has something like this kind of petty pity-party (or is it pitiable petty-party).
9. Ghosts of Love Perhaps I have loved too well and too readily. Certainly too poorly. Regret, however, is not necessarily a desire for things to have been different. It can also be the acceptance of what has already been.
10. Life’s an Adventure with You Even the man with the best intentions must face the inescapable fact that “after all, he’s just a man,” as St. Tammy Wynette so gently put it. The eternal waltz between man and woman is one of life’s great mysteries – and odd jokes.
11. Where Were You? This is an old song, the verses of which were reactions to various topically current events in my past. Except that history keeps repeating itself, and the questions remain. Not the answers, mind you – just the questions.
12. Keep On Smilin’ I released a whole CD of my faith-based songs, and included one such in the original TAKING TURNS collection. Accepting life on life’s terms and remaining mindful of the work I have been given to do both keep me writing. More correctly, these things make me a better scribe for my Muse.