My Songs
by Mike Brosig, Sr.
It’s been said that living in the world today takes everything you’ve got. It is very true when you look at all the issues and problems and conflict and things going on in the world today. It can be very depressing. Sometimes if we get lost in those issues, we forget that we are living in the world of God, not in the world of man. But I feel what we have to do is to focus on the good things that are happening to us and the positives that we experience in life.
It is interesting that when I have written the songs that I have in the past, they are usually done through my 3 o’clock in the morning thoughts. I wake up with a melody in my head, and I come up with a current day theme that I am faced with at that time and put the words to those melodies, once I have figured out that the melodies weren’t the same as songs that have already been produced.
But this year something very different happened. At 3 AM one morning I woke up from my sleep and had all the words for two verses of a song in my head; it was a reminder that we are living in the world of God. I wrote those two verses down on paper and developed words for third verse. Then I worked on constructing a melody for that song which did not resemble any current songs that I was familiar with.
After developing that song melody with the words, I took it to Joe Gaunt who has been the Choir Director at St. Benedict Church for the last 43 years, and who is an extremely talented musician. He helped me put the proper beats and measures of that song together and played the piano accompaniment for that song. He helped alter some of the words to make them fit in those beats and measures. Then he had Christine Olivares who sings in church for Saint Benedict in Johnstown, and has been blind since birth, sing the melody of that song. She was one of 17 Performers in the Unveiling Brilliance: Celebrating Talent at Believe You Can! 2022 Talent Show on October 15, 2022.
Being touched by that version of the song I had, my sons and my granddaughter put a video behind that song that had pictures of our family’s life and others to bring those words to life. Jerene Philibin, who works with the choir at St. Benedict Church added closed captioning on the video. My hope is that this song and the videos will help people realize that they have similar experiences as well, to realize that we are living in the world of God.
In the past, I also created 3 meal prayer song melodies which started a few years ago when my son’s stepdaughter said that the prayers we say before every meal should be put to a melody. So I wrote a melody for a regular mealtime prayer and called it “Maya’s Song”. Then when visiting my other son, a month or so later, his wife asked me if I could do her mealtime prayer song to a melody. And so I wrote “Kelly’s Song”. A couple of months after that, my daughter’s twin boys, who were about eight years old at the time, asked me if I could do a mealtime prayer song for them. Since those other two prayer songs were the only two prayers said regularly for a meal, or at least the only two that I knew of, I had to write both the lyrics and melody for a new prayer song, which I entitled “Hayden’s and Landon’s Song”, which I did accomplish.
In the past, I wrote three songs: “Lovelight”, “Natures Courses”, and “COVID-19 Lessons Learned”.
This is just one of the stories of my life since I have always felt, said, and truly believed, that I have lived a very storied life!
See Mike’s interview with KC O’Day on Fox 8 News Now on January 23 here.
