__At one extreme, collaboration could mean sitting for endless hours at the piano with Johnny Mercer, with Carl’s mom bringing in bowls of kreplach for sustenance. Just as frequently, however, “collaboration” was actually a solitary, inspirational experience. Which brings us to the story of “Ebb Tide,” the song Michael says his father recognized as “transcendent.” It brought together all the elements of Carl’s philosophy of songwriting in a process the songwriter himself, in a chapter from an aborted autobiography, described as “the near-perfect wedding of melody to lyrics.”
__“Anyone involved with songwriting will testify to the fact that each song, no matter how pure or from the heart, has its own story, its own peculiar way of getting written,” Carl wrote. “Some cases are of course more peculiar or more paradoxical than others, but invariably some quirk or twist of luck enters the picture to prod a lyric or melody to its completion. And sometimes some extenuating circumstance occurs which is really unrelated to the musical aspect of the song, but which adds a note of humor and completeness to the job of songwriting.”
__In the case of “Ebb Tide,” the melody (and title) came from harpist-composer Robert Maxwell. He titled the song as he did because the music he wrote evoked what Carl describes as “the flowing quality of water, and particularly the rhythmic and building quality of the tides.” When asked by a music publisher to supply lyrics to the melody, because a host of singers were anxious to record the song, so certain were they of its hit potential, Carl balked. “In a way, it brought together all the difficulties which confront lyric writers, and all at one time,” he wrote. “Usually when we get melodies to write lyrics to, the tunes either have no titles at all or titles which somehow fit naturally into the tune, with respect to accents, etc.
__“But ‘Ebb Tide’? I knew from the start that those words would never fit into that tune, and in addition I had no idea what kind of meaningful lyric I would write that would even remotely connect itself to the title.” >

“Anyone involved with songwriting will testify to the fact that each song, no matter how pure or from the heart, has its own story, its own peculiar way of getting written.”

—Carl Sigman