The Story Behind the Song
Sometimes a song begins with heartbreak, a memory, or something you've carried around for years.
And sometimes it begins while you're hanging a television on the wall with your son and looking for a black marker.
My son Louie and I were hanging my TV when he asked me if I had a black marker.
I said, “Do you mean a Magic Marker?”
I laughed my butt off.
The problem was, Louie wasn't joking. He couldn't understand what I thought was so funny. He hadn't grown up in the era when we called them Magic Markers, so he thought I was just making the whole thing up.
I tried explaining to him that there really was a company called Magic Marker, and that when I was growing up, that's simply what everybody called them.
He wasn't buying it.
So the next day I actually had to prove to my 37-year-old son that Magic Markers were real.
That little exchange stayed in my head because the more I thought about Louie’s completely innocent question, “What makes it magic?”, the less silly the question became.
What does make something magic?
Maybe magic isn't something hidden inside a marker. Maybe it's something that's been around us our entire lives.
It's watching a sunset disappear across the water. It's the wind through the trees, the reflection of the sky on a lake, music coming from a guitar, memories made with family and friends, and those ordinary little moments that somehow stay with us forever.
Sometimes we're so busy looking for something extraordinary that we miss the extraordinary things already surrounding us.
And that's how a father and son hanging a television, and one completely serious question about a black marker, became a song.
Louie asked me, “What makes it magic?”
I think I finally figured out the answer.