Trading Horror Stories, the new Paul Lewis CD, is on the way – Paul says it’s coming out in January, but you know how release dates can be, so we’ll wait and see. But I have now heard two tracks, and am getting awfully excited about this one.

Of course, in the interest of full discosure, it should be noted that I’m a co-writer on one of the tunes. Last night, after weeks and months of badgering, Paul finally sent me an mp3 of the song “Bittersweet,” which makes heavy use of some lyrics I wrote for him. Well, actually, I originally wrote those lyrics for fikshun and Fiction 8, and here’s what’s so weird about it all. I wrote those lyrics for what Mike described as a dark, industrial hate-blues song (that’s probably not exactly what he said, but it’s what I heard), and at the time I was conceiving of Forever, Neverafter as perhaps a suite of songs surrounding the life and times of Roy Baty (sort of a “missing years” project – you know, like where was Jesus all those years up until he turned 30, that kind of thing; the song “Winter Rain” from that record is up that alley). The lyrics Paul has adapted were aimed at the emptiness of the replicant, who is superhuman in all ways except one – he/she lacks empathy, some real sense of what it means to be human. So in that sense, the song was a pretty dark, brutal lament – we have everything except the thing that matters the most. For a number of reasons, F8 didn’t use the lyrics (or the song idea, for that matter). So when I was talking to Paul a few months later and the subject came up, I figured I’d send him some words and see what he made of them.

So last night I download “Bittersweet,” and that hate-blues idea? Yeah, that’s pretty much not what Paul did. Instead, he’s turned the lyrics inward and made something more personal of them. It’s less of a socio-political statement and more of a song about love gone bad, but musically it’s just gorgeous – really, it’s one of the prettiest bits of tunesmithing I’ve heard in awhile.

I know that the lead single from Trading Horror Stories is already getting some airplay up Paul’s way, and I hope that down the road a few stations see fit to add “Bittersweet.” Paul has done something wonderful here, and I’m honored to have my name attached to it in some small way.