A Song For Animal Night.

Wednesday night. Kulak's Woodshed. Marc Platt, Steve Schalchlin and four or five women.

"Wow," Marc said with a huge grin on his face. "All girls. And just two guys."

"Steve's one of the girls," someone said.

And it's true. I am.

And so is Marc, by the way.

And the girls? Well, we had a variety from my generation rock chick to young and ambitious girls with guitars. It's small-cast musical nice.

I told them I had helped a friend write some "songs for kids," and that I've been thinking about Animal Night coming up on Saturday. And that it would be fun to write a song on that theme.

And that's exactly what we did. Val, Bo, Avril and Steve.

I'm going to sing it Saturday night. It will be broadcast live.

This is scary because I can tell you every songwriter loves The Newest Song. The Newest Song is the greatest song ever written by any being which can produce a song or body movement. The newest song is the epic you've always been trying to reach.

You learn through experience, however, that the "newest song syndrome" wears off with time, and meh, it's another song. Everybody's got one.

So, I'm working on the piano part now. When you write "lyrics first," which we did, then the song gets written top down. The movement of the rhythm that lies beneath the words is not created. It's discovered. And that's what I'm jammin' on.

See you Saturday night. Live. (Gulp).

Oh, and tonight I'm hosting for Tracy Newman. Lorraine Newman's very talented singer/songwriter sister.