The seeds of this song were planted in 1987. And when I say seeds, I mean one very small seed. A melody and a single line of lyrics: “And the rain came down on the lonely head of Monday's Child.”

That was it.

No verses. No story. No additional music. And not the slightest idea what the hell a “Monday's Child” was supposed to be. I played around with it for a while, got absolutely nowhere, and eventually forgot about it.

Or so I thought.

Nearly forty years later, while working on songs for my second album, that damned melody suddenly reappeared in my head. I hadn't thought about it in twenty or twenty-five years. Yet there it was, exactly as I remembered it, wandering around my brain as though it had never left…and it wouldn't go away.

One thing I've discovered during these recording projects is that once I finish writing a song, it generally stops occupying my thoughts. Apparently, my brain considers the matter settled and moves on to something else. So I finally decided to write the damned thing.

Not because I was particularly excited about it.

Not because I thought I'd rediscovered some long-lost masterpiece.

I simply wanted to get rid of it so I could return to recording the newer songs I actually cared about. A noble artistic motivation, I know. My first instinct was to get rid of the words “Monday's Child.” I tried replacing them with different phrases, different images, and different ideas.

Nothing worked.

Apparently, those two words had acquired squatter's rights sometime around 1987 and weren't about to surrender the property. So I finally asked myself the question I'd never been able to answer.

What the hell does Monday's Child even mean?

I began imagining a child for whom every day felt like Monday. Not Monday in the ordinary sense, when the weekend is over and everyone has to drag themselves back to work or school. I mean Monday as a state of existence. A day filled with dread. Loneliness. Fear. A day you desperately wish would never arrive. From there, the character began to take shape.

He became a boy who was being bullied at school. A lonely child who tried desperately to remain invisible, hoping that if he kept his head down and stayed out of everyone's way, perhaps nobody would notice him.

But they always did.

Tuesday became Monday.

Wednesday became Monday.

Every day he had to return to school was another Monday.

One particular lyric owes something to a scene from The Breakfast Club. In the film, Andrew, played by Emilio Estevez, describes humiliating another boy to impress his friends and his father. What makes the scene so powerful isn't simply his confession. It's the moment when he imagines the boy having to go home and explain to his father what had happened.

The shame. The humiliation. The helplessness.

Estevez delivers that scene beautifully, and it has stayed with me for decades. That memory influenced the line: “He hides it from his father to save himself the shame.”

Of course, there's nothing shameful about being bullied. The victim has done nothing wrong. But knowing that intellectually doesn't necessarily change how a frightened child experiences it. Humiliation can become shame. And shame can become something you carry alone.

Originally, I intended to give the song a much happier ending. Monday's Child would grow up, become successful, and eventually encounter the people who had tormented him. I even imagined his childhood bully seeing him years later and feeling jealous of everything he'd accomplished. There was a certain satisfaction in that idea.

The kid gets the last laugh. The bullies get their comeuppance. Everybody goes home happy. Except the more I thought about it, the more dishonest it seemed. Life doesn't always work that way.

Childhood trauma doesn't necessarily disappear because someone becomes successful. Recognition, wealth, respect, and personal accomplishment don't automatically erase experiences that shaped us when we were young. So I abandoned the tidy ending.

Monday's Child does grow up. He succeeds. He builds a good life and becomes, for the most part, a happy and accomplished adult. But somewhere inside him, that frightened little boy is still there. And some scars don't heal.

Now, before I go any further, I should probably address the length of this song. It's over seven minutes long. Apparently, I've never met a seven-minute song I didn't like. I genuinely don't know what it is with me and long damned songs. Between Track Zero and the material I've written for my second album, I think there are exactly two songs under four minutes.

My preferred song structure seems to be: Verse. Chorus. Verse. Chorus. Bridge. Okay, now that we've established the basic premise, let's begin the song.

I don't do this intentionally. I never sit down at the piano and think, “You know what this composition really needs? Another three minutes.” But I'll reach a point where the music seems to want to go somewhere else, and rather than force it into a conventional structure, I generally let it. If I were trying to write three-minute radio hits, somebody would probably need to stage an intervention.

Fortunately, I'm not.

I'm making these records primarily because I want to make them. And if a song needs seven and a half minutes to tell its story, that's what it gets. Although, technically, this one runs a little over seven minutes.

I'm improving.

Marginally.

But “Monday's Child” needed those extra moments because the story wasn't finished when the lyrics ended. There was something else I wanted to communicate. And that became the chaos at the end of the recording. For the final twenty or thirty seconds, the music begins to disintegrate.

Different instruments move through different keys, different meters, and different tempos. Each seems to be following its own musical logic, increasingly disconnected from everything around it. Occasionally, if you listen carefully, the pieces almost seem to find one another. For a moment, there's the suggestion that everything might finally come together.

Then it falls apart again.

As it turns out, writing intentional musical chaos is a real bitch. Those few seconds took me as long to compose as the rest of the damned song. I tried several approaches, most of which sounded terrible.

Random noise is easy. But creating the impression of a musical structure falling apart while retaining enough control to communicate a specific emotional idea is considerably more difficult. The instruments can't simply play whatever they want. The disorder has to feel deliberate, even when the listener experiences it as confusion. And the occasional moments of apparent unity are essential. Without them, there's no sense of something struggling to hold itself together.

That's what the passage represents. The world inside Monday's Child. Outwardly, his life has turned out well. He's successful, respected, and mostly happy. But the frightened child he once was hasn't entirely disappeared. And somewhere beneath the orderly surface of his adult life, the chaos continues.

When I first finished recording the song, I wasn't particularly impressed with it. In fact, I'd suspected from the beginning that I was writing what musicians sometimes dismiss as B-side material. I hadn't started the project because I believed the song was particularly good. I'd started it because a forty-year-old melody had returned from the grave and was driving me out of my mind. And when the recording was finished, I thought I'd accomplished exactly what I set out to do.

The melody was gone.

My brain was quiet.

Mission accomplished.

I wasn't even planning to make a video for it or share it on Facebook. But something about the recording kept bothering me. Eventually, I realized what it was.

The central melodic hook of the chorus was fine. That was the one part I'd liked since 1987. The problem was the two lines leading into it. They weren't earning the hook. The emotional intensity simply wasn't there. So I rewrote those two lines and recorded the vocals again, this time abandoning the cleaner delivery I'd originally used in favor of something grittier and more blues-influenced.

I leaned harder into certain notes, allowed more texture into the voice, and tried to make the performance reflect the emotional weight of the story. And suddenly, the song began to work. Not because I'd fundamentally changed the composition. I'd simply found the right way to deliver it.

Now, I still wouldn't rank “Monday's Child” among the best songs I've written. I don't think it belongs in the same conversation as “Sleeplessness and Sunrise” or “Clearwater Sun,” and rewriting two lines didn't suddenly convince me I'd uncovered some forgotten masterpiece. But something more important happened.

I listened to the revised recording. And for the first time, I found myself genuinely thinking about this poor kid.

About the mornings he dreaded.

The humiliation he endured.

The things he couldn't bring himself to tell his father.

The years he spent trying to become someone nobody could hurt.

And the little boy who remained inside him even after he'd succeeded.

And I found myself tearing up.

That surprised me. After nearly forty years, a peculiar little fragment of melody that I'd forgotten, rediscovered, unsuccessfully tried to rename, and finally completed largely because I wanted it to leave me the hell alone had somehow become something that affected me emotionally.

It wasn't what I'd intended.

It certainly wasn't what I'd expected.

But there it was. And I realized that perhaps I'd been judging the song by the wrong standard. Not every composition needs to be a musical masterpiece. Sometimes its value lies in the story it tells, the emotion it communicates, or the possibility that someone listening might recognize a little of themselves in it.

If “Monday's Child” can move me, perhaps it can move someone else. And if it can do that, then after nearly forty years of refusing to leave me alone, the little bastard has earned its place on the album.