I love owls. Owls are just cool. But we’ll get to that.

You never know when song inspiration is going to come along. Some liken it to “fishing”, waiting for the right one to come along and bite. Others just say it’s “being open to the muse”. I like to just be observant, without being obsessive – okay, maybe a *little* obsessive – about what’s around me. This means “casually” eavesdropping in restaurants, writing down anything (words, phrases, rhymes, bits of a phrase you hear on TV) that might eventually be a good lyric or title…and just listening.

Sounds also lead to interesting ideas. When I wrote “Charlie and Chloe” for the “Starlite Drive-In Saturday Night” CD, I had their story in mind, but the sound of a coyote drove much of the song. (Hence the line, “Since hanging out with Chloe, Charlie’s acting less remote / And since hanging out with Charlie, Chloe barks like a coyote”.)

It only made sense to kick off the CD track with baying coyotes. Unfortunately, our local coyotes just aren’t that cooperative. They’re active, but I swear they know when the field recorder’s on. I used public domain recordings in the song and video. It needed something else, and since frogs are ALSO cool, my wife and hunkered down near the slough behind the airport one night, and recorded acres of frogs. More than I’ll ever need, but hey, you never know. (See the video above – coyotes and frogs kick it off.)

Okay, so what about the owl? We have an owl that lurks in the tree outside our bedroom window at night. He takes the nightshift right after the pair of red-tailed hawks that circle overhead all day check out at dusk. The other night I heard him…and then I heard a call-and-response from a few others that were in the orchard outside our house:

Click for the call-and-response owls chorus. It’s definitely pretty cool.

I had no idea they did this. And no idea what they were talking about. But I bet I can make up something. Where’s my notepad?