A Song for Jessica

A Song for Jessica for voice with piano. 2009

I have this (annoying) habit of randomly blurting out songs.  When I see a woman whose name is also a song title, *shoomp!*, out it comes.  So it was that I happened to see two female students walking away from my office door several years ago:  Angela and Rhiannon.  I had songs for both of them, so they each got a little snippet.  When I got to my office, Jessica was standing there, and I apologized for not having a song for her.  She replied, "Oh, that's okay!" but I insisted "No, there really ought to be a song for Jessica!"  And so now there is.  Here, the namesake is a tired, broken-down waitress in some dusty, backwater Texas town.  Our cowboy troubador sees her every day for breakfast, and he manages to glean that underneath her dull, shabby exterior is a woman of gold.  He tells us of her life, why she's trapped in this nowhereville, and wonders whether he ought to try "rescuing" her.