In middle school and high school I signed up for every music class I could, or as many as the schools would allow. I played French horn and trumpet, sang in several choirs, and got solos in every show. I knew I wanted to do music for the rest of my life, but I had no idea how to achieve that goal. In my childish mind all I could see was bright lights and a big stage. But what would I actually sing? I didn’t have anyone to buy me songs from the writers in the industry. It didn’t occur to me that I could write the songs myself until later.

In the fall of 2005, a few short months after finishing high school, I flew across the country to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It was the best, and most drunken, ten days of my entire life. I still miss the deep-fried pizza sticks they had at every gas station.

Having grown up on the west coast, where grunge and pop punk were king in the 90s-2000s, I had never experienced rock music the way Murfreesboro loved rock music. Every bar had the best live bands, and there was always a huge crowd. It was eye-opening. I flew home with a brand new mandolin and my first Beatles album, Abbey Road.

I fell in love with The Beatles. Soon I had every album on CD and on Vinyl. I devoured the Wikipedia page for the band, and then the pages for each of the members, former members, managers, and producers. When I read about John not realizing that writing his own songs was a possibility until Paul showed him some originals, it hit me that I had never thought of that possibility either. Enter my new Epiphone acoustic guitar.

I dedicated myself to writing songs. For years I wrote as many as six songs per week, studying every artist I listened to so that I could better understand songwriting. I started bands that went nowhere, played every open mic night in Vegas, started more bands, and then played the bars too. In the last 20 years I have written over 700 hundred songs, most of which are awful. I estimate that only ninety of them are good enough, or what I view as good enough, to put on an album. Let’s explore one of them.

In the summer of 2015 I came out as bisexual. A year later a man entered a club in Florida and killed forty-nine people, because he thought that only straight people deserved to live. The next night in Vegas, and I’m sure elsewhere, LGBT people gathered in every LGBT space to mourn together. I wanted to be with them, so badly I wanted to be with my community, but I was stuck without a car in a conservative town an hour away. Having no other outlet for my emotions, I turned to my guitar. I wrote a song that encompassed my grief for the shooting, my anger that mass shootings were still happening so often, and my anger at the talking heads and politicians who pretended to care for a day or two, and then went right back to advocating against gun reform.

Today they don’t so much pretend to care, but in 2016 it was all thoughts and prayers, lamenting over how sad it was that people died, and then ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ You’ll notice very quickly in this song that I’m repeatedly saying how sad I am, and how I want people to know that, and how no one ever said it wasn’t sad that people died. These aren’t my words, but quotes from twitter on the day of the shooting, the endless feed of it. It was all a performance for these people, to try to appear as if they gave a shit, and it was infuriating.

So, that’s a little of my personal history as a musician, and how this incredibly sardonic song came about. Bullets And Guns lived in my head and my voice memos until 2021, when a young kid in Argentina helped me record it. Below I’ve included the music video in this article. I encourage to watch it. It’s one thing to know it’s happening, it’s another to see it listed so plainly. We’re nearly 6 years on from this video, and nothing has changed. Mass shootings are still a near daily occurrence, the right still doesn’t care, and I remain just as furious over this issue as I was when I wrote this song.

LYRICS:

It’s sad, so sad

Your apathy changes nothing

Fifty more prayers upon fifty more coffins

Sad, so sad

Who do we blame anymore

The bigots, religion, or even ourselves

Sad, so sad

This is all so very sad

It’s sad, oh so sad

I want you to know I’m feeling sad

And a, a tear for the fallen

They never asked for this

A love that’s so forbidden

Asserting your thoughts with your bullets and guns

Sad, so sad

It’s really all so very sad

It’s sad, oh so sad

I want you to know I’m feeling sad

And my prayers, they’re with you

My thoughts, they do forgive you

But could you try to love anyone else

Sad

You can take my children

You can take the gays

But don’t you dare take my guns away

Sad, so sad

This is all so very sad

It’s sad, oh so sad

No one ever said it wasn’t sad

Sad (I want you to know)

Sad (Yeah I want you to know)

Sad (I want you to know I’m feeling)

Sad (No one ever said it wasn’t)