Songwriting: Come to Me

Come to me all of you weary
Come to me all who are lost
Come to me all of you hungry
I'll feed you whatever the cost
The road that we choose is a hard one
It wearies me right to the bone
But come take my hand now together
And you won't have to walk it alone

Come to me when you are tired
Come to me when you are sad
When deep in troubles you're mired
I'll comfort you, make you feel glad
The road that we choose is a long one
We may stumble and trip on a stone
So come take my hand now together
And you won't have to walk it alone

Come to me all of you nations
Looking for the right way to turn
Come to me all of you leaders
With so many lessons to learn
The road we must choose is a strong one
We can choose it when we are full grown
So let's join our hands all together
And we won't have to walk it alone

This song came to me when I was driving home from church, exasperated at the lousy choir and yet another plodding 3/4 time song. I was thinking "I could write a better song than that!", and composed the melody and the first two verses in my head. Supper intervened when I reached home, so I had to wait until after dinner to put it down on paper. The hard part was coming up with a third verse. As we Hitchens' are immune to hard work, I was getting desperate after 15 minutes. I finally hit on the happy idea of turning it from a church song to a universal song.

Thus you could look at verse 1 as God to person, verse 2 as person then reaching out to another person, and verse 3 is then a community reaching out to a greater - very nice flow.

So there we go - a 15-minute throwaway song. Strangely enough, Sally likes the song so the effort wasn't wasted.