“Hearts Afire!”, c. 2003: L to R, top: Launa Fujimoto, me, Kay Johnson.
Bottom: Jennifer Burnett, Cheryl Hiraoka. (Photo by me, thanks to my tripod and self-timer!)

“God’s Lullaby (Song for Brenna)”
Words & Music © 1996 Geoff Coe / All rights reserved

There is a place I know where you can always go
If there’s a doubt or a fear, I’ll always be here, I love you so.
And in my open arms, I’ll keep you safe from harm until the sun awakes to hasten in the dawn.

(Instrumental)

When the nighttime feels so lonely
And you long for someone at your side,
You can count on me, I will always be
Close at hand. . .I will understand!

So say your prayers for me, and trust your cares to me,
And know that as you are sleeping, angels are keeping watch for you.
Lay down your head, my child, and dream sweet dreams awhile.
When you awake, we’ll make them all come true.
When you awake, we’ll make them all come true!

Hey, you! You, with your chin on the ground! Why are you moping around
With the weight of the world on your shoulders?
Stop! There’s a way you can lighten the load, put a spring in your step down the road. It’ll straighten your spine like a soldier.

(Chorus)
Take a leap of faith and trust in that higher power! With a leap of faith your troubles will fade from view. It only takes a leap of faith to put all your dreams in motion. And when you keep the faith your blessings will come to you.

When you have a day when your signals are crossed,
and the sign on the road says: “I’m lost!” and you’re spinning in twenty directions,
Stop! Get in touch with the spirit inside. Let the song in your heart be your guide. You’ll be glad that you made the connection!

(Chorus)

I got my share of circumstances, and so do you!
But we can look at them as chances to let the light through. . .

(Instrumental)

(Chorus)
It only takes a leap of faith!
You know it’s gonna a heap of faith!
It’s only takes a leap of faith!
You know it’s gonna take a heap of faith!
It only takes a leap of faith!
You know it’s gonna take a heap of faith!
It only takes a leap of faith!
You know it’s gonna take a heap of faith!
And when you keep the faith, your blessings will come to you!

A fun page for my Facebook friends who are curious about (one of) my past lives as a musician, chiefly as a songwriter and music arranger for Mile Hi Church in Lakewood, CO (a suburb of Denver).

I joined the church in 1991, invited there by a charming woman I’d met during a gym workout who had been attending regularly since she’d moved back to Colorado a few months earlier. I wasn’t a “church guy,” but she assured me this mid-week service was relaxed, different, and musically based. And besides, at that moment I’d have walked over hot coals if she’d suggested it. Compared with that, I reasoned, a church service didn’t seem so bad!

We sat in the front row of the 800-seat sanctuary, all the better to watch and listen to the church’s solo vocalist, Anne Achenbach, and marvel at the music director, Kent Rautenstraus, play piano like some other-worldly mashup of Bruce Hornsby and Mozart. (Apt comparisons fail me even today.)

Halfway through the service, Anne sang a solo, and I was overcome by the beauty of her voice. She reminded me of no artist more than my favorite, Linda Ronstadt. Caught up in the musical moment, I leaned toward my friend and whispered, “Someday, I’m going to write a song for that woman!” My new friend didn’t patronize me or laugh it off; she said, “Cool! I look forward to hearing that!” That’s when I sensed I was in someplace special.

”OK,” you’re thinking about now, “Did you marry this woman??” Long story short: No. But among many new lessons I learned over the next few weeks’ worth of sermons was the notion that people come into your life for a reason—and it’s incumbent upon us to trust a higher power, or fate, or whatever you call it, and let that reason reveal itself over time. So although no romance ever got off the ground, it’s clear to me that this was the moment my music did.

A few months later, I joined the church, and almost immediately, the 70-voice choir. Not long after that, none other than Anne herself approached me after a rehearsal and asked if we could talk. Besides being the regular soloist, Anne was the leader of the soprano section and assistant choir director, and her musical knowledge was every bit the equal of her singing talent. My first thought was: What, I screwed something up?

We sat down together on two folding chairs in the church’s vestibule. Somewhat hesitantly, she said that she had written some lyrics that she really liked, but she needed a songwriter, and could I take a look at them?

I was surprised, to put it mildly. I don’t know how she knew I had written music before—the last time had been back in college, twenty years or so earlier. And I didn’t recall ever having mentioned it to her in our brief but friendly conversations up to this moment. But beyond my nervousness, I was sensing the glimmer of an opportunity. Eyes wide, palms sweating, I said, “Ummm……sure?”

We agreed that she would bring the lyrics to our Saturday afternoon rehearsal for Easter services, just two days later. I spent my Friday half-hoping she’d forget that we’d had the conversation. She did not. A few minutes after the Saturday rehearsal wrapped, Anne handed me some neatly typewritten lyrics and we took a couple of minutes to chat about them.

I left rehearsal and walked to my Honda Accord in the parking lot, wondering what I had just gotten myself into. Then I thought: ”You gave your word. Better trust whatever force in the universe had you give it!” and decided to take a good look at the lyrics before I drove home. I studied them carefully, then noticed it was starting to drizzle. I flipped on the windshield wipers.

The moment I did, the swoosh-swoosh sound they made set a tempo. Then I flipped two lines of lyrics to make the rhyme scheme work. A moment after that, out of nowhere, I started humming a melody. Just a single line, for the moment, but it was a start! I grabbed my choir folder and jotted down the notes I’d hummed so I wouldn’t forget them on the drive home.

Sunday was Easter: four services of singing choral music, so there was no time for anything else. On Sunday evening, exhausted, I fell asleep on the couch all night. And I had a dream in which Annie sang the song I’d written, but couldn’t finish it because she started to cry. That dream turned out to be a powerful motivator.

On Monday, luckily, I didn’t have to be at work until late afternoon. Still gritty-eyed at 10 AM, I fired up a half-pot of coffee and sat down at my spinet piano, armed only with a #2 pencil and a few sheets of musical staff paper, to get to work. By mid-afternoon or so, I had the basics of the song in hand, and I spent what spare time I had over the next couple of days polishing, and then writing it out neatly on the staff paper.

I got Anne’s attention before our Thursday rehearsal and held the music up in the air. “You’ve got it already?” she gasped. “My gosh…sure! See you at the piano when we’re done!”

I don’t recall what, if anything, I explained to her, beyond making sure she could read my handwriting. Among her other gifts, Annie was (and is) a first-rate, first-take reader of a musical score. I sat down at the piano, played an eight-bar intro I’d written in my head but not yet committed to paper, and she began to sing.

We went straight through the song, almost as though she’d sung it a hundred times: two verses, two choruses, a bridge, a dramatic key change to set up the final chorus. And then, suddenly, she stopped, and I looked up. She’d laid the music atop the piano to wipe away the tears streaming down her face. “It’s absolutely perfect,” she said, and gave me a hug. And a few weeks later, she introduced me to the congregation and sang the ballad—”Just For You”— at one of the Wednesday night services, and three more on Sunday. (I don’t have a live recording of that one…still looking!)

I spent 13 years after that in the music ministry, becoming a musical section leader in the choir, writing “lead sheets” (words, music, and chords) for the four-piece World’s Most Dangerous Church Band, regularly penning original songs for Annie and (as noted above) Launa, as well as vocal arrangements for “Hearts Afire!” (the quartet pictured above), and full choral arrangements for Easter services. I stopped writing music only when I moved to Florida in 2004. I was ready for new, different challenges and a recharge of the creative batteries, and I’m happy to have had that—even if I didn’t expect it to last nearly two decades. But truly, I haven’t found a musical outlet here in Florida nearly as satisfying as my service to the Mile Hi Music ministry and the friends I made there.

If my future audience is limited only to myself, neighbors sitting on their porches, and the cats, that’s OK with me. I’ll always have Mile Hi to remember, and I’m grateful for that.