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The Best was re-mastered in September 2022
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This is a song about forgiveness.

Years ago a friend’s father had died. He was deeply upset because he couldn’t bring himself to respect his father saying that he’d failed as a father. It was clear that he did not believe that his father had done his best. I said ‘maybe not, but he probably did the best he knew how”. That phrase made a difference to my friend and, perhaps, allowed him to look at his father in a different way. It stuck with me ever since.

This is also my story and possibly every parent’s story. We all fail to some extent. We all could have done better and wish we had. But we all did what we knew to do. We can only hope that it was enough.

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I wrote The Best a few years ago.  I’d played it in front of a few groups and it was always well received.  One time I played it and someone from the audience ask who wrote it.  I took that to be high praise.  A couple of years ago I approached John Vallins to ask if he could produce a couple of songs for me.

I’d done a song writing course with him in 2012 and I knew he had a home studio and produced music.  He took the song and heard in it a ballad.  That wasn’t how I’d thought of it and it wasn’t how I’d been performing it, but I trusted John and he put together this song.  (More than I year later I did my own recording that sounds more like I originally imagined it.  It isn’t as polished a recording as John’s but you can find it here: Best That I Knew How.)

This song was the first I ever entered into a songwriting competition.  It made it to the Shortlist in the Australian Songwriting Contest 2021 – ballad category.  That’s not winning, but it was very encouraging.