Moonlight Without You
Words & Music by Benny Mann
Fall 1999

Very rarely am I able to just sit down and write a song from start to finish in one session. This song was an exception.

In the fall of 1999, I was home on break from Hamilton College for a long weekend and it was one of those autumn evenings in New England where there is that distinct bright crispness in the air. I was sitting on my parents back deck in Montgomery and for one reason or another I just stumbled across several great riffs that flowed together with wondrous perfection. I was amazed and so I rushed to put together appropriate lyrics.

That day I had been driving around the hilltowns thinking about whether or not I might bump into an old high school flame. I desperately wanted to see her “accidentally” and simultaneously feared terribly the potential for a meeting. I found myself wandering into local businesses taking care of “errands” and making myself visible in public. I never did run into her and to this day we still haven’t had a chance encounter, even though I have now moved back to the area after my journeys.

I didn’t really feel comfortable discussing the specifics of my feelings in the song but I did very much want to work with the reservoir of emotions supplied by the experience. I decided to try a tactic that I still use to this day. I peeled back the details of the situation until I was left with the glowing coals of sensation in my heart. I then rebuilt a similar though different fictional experience that I could discuss with a renewed though more safe personal perspective. The specific lyrics of the song are the result. I enjoyed the effort and I found myself rejuvenated with the completion of this tune.

There is one final note that I must relate. When I look back on the creation of this work now I remember there being an early rising moon guiding me in the sky that night. I recall it as a blue-white, half crescent, rising defiantly from a starless azure sea. I take comfort in the memory of that vision even though I realize that it is most likely an image that was borne into existence only by my fertile and melodramatic imagination.