The sheet music: Treehouse
This is a rough demo of my new song Treehouse. (For a higher quality track, go to Soundcloud.com). The lyrics are in an earlier post.
This song is based on a real treehouse that I helped rebuild when I was eleven years old. The treehouse was preexisting and dilapidated, about six feet off the ground in a large oak tree situated on the side of a slow moving creek in northern Illinois. A few other kids, whom I didn’t know, and I worked together to fix it up.
In the song I refer to a few things I came across that same summer including the vestiges of an abandoned share cropper’s camp. The “dark green” painted treehouse refers to one currently on the side of a canal in Center Moriches, Long Island.
The song’s initial inspiration came after reading Charles Louv’s book “The Last Child in the Woods.” The book got me thinking about the differences between my childhood and my daughter’s. My childhood, after nine years old, was akin to Hunkleberry Finn’s but in the borderline boonies outside of Chicago and my daughter’s is in the boonies of New York City but with much less adventure and freedom than I had.
