To Wonder

Song Notes

One day while driving in to park at the EcoVillage, I opened my mouth and out popped this melody, with a bunch of unintelligible syllables posing as real words, something like, “Dah Wanyah, Ah-dah ma-yi-ki lah-wye!” I’d recently attended a songwriting workshop up in Victoria with Nashville songwriter Beth Nielson Chapman, where she’d suggested, when nonsense syllables come bursting in on a melody, to just “ride the vowels” and see what words they’re suggesting to you. So “Dah Wanyah” became “To Wonder” and the song commenced to write itself. If you have a choir, it’s fun to rehearse all the parts and then hold up a poster board with the words on it and ask the audience to sing along when you perform it. They always seem to jump right in on the melody and get a kick out of it, particularly the “Sometimes I have to confess..” part, where you can really ham up the “..singing with yooooo!” Remember, after the “singing with you” you plug in “in wonder” for “to wonder” and finish the song with “in”.