By Pam Kragen
ENCINITAS
Around Thanksgiving last year, famed singer/songwriter Jack Tempchin was admiring the homemade gingerbread man ornaments his artist wife, Sheryl, was hanging on their Christmas tree, and inspiration struck.
The Encinitas resident started strumming his guitar and writing what would become his first holiday-themed song, “The Gingerbread Man,” inspired by the children’s folk tale about a runaway Christmas cookie. But there was one problem. Sheryl always hated that story because no matter how far the gingerbread man ran, he always got eaten in the end by a wily fox.
“She didn’t like that the moral of the story is ‘you’re born to a certain fate,’ so I wanted to come up with a different ending. This one just popped into my head,” said Tempchin, who was inducted last year into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York. He’s best known for penning the 1972 hit “Peaceful Easy Feeling” for The Eagles, but his vast catalog includes numerous songs written with his late pal Glenn Frey (“The One You Love,” “Smugglers Blues” and “You Belong to the City”) and with many other collaborators.
His “Gingerbread Man” song — which has since become a video and a children’s book — starts out the traditional way with a fresh-out-of-the-oven gingerbread man running away from its baker and encountering a sly fox. But in Tempchin’s version, the cookie outwits the fox and flies to Paris, where he becomes a debonaire jazz singer and lives happily ever after. When Tempchin debuted the song last winter in a concert at the La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas, it was such a hit with audience members that he decided to record it.
To make a music video, Tempchin, 73, reached out to Savannah Philyaw, a San Diego singer-songwriter who’s also an artist. Over several months, she created an animated video to accompany the song that features drawings of the Tempchins baking gingerbread men and chasing the sprinting cookie down the sidewalk. There are also scenes of the gingerbread man flying in a hot air balloon, visiting the Eiffel Tower and scaling the Notre-Dame cathedral.
The song is now available as a download on Apple Music and Spotify, and the video can be viewed at gingerbreadman.fun, where the instructions for Sheryl’s great-grandmother’s ginger snap and gingerbread recipes can be found in the descriptive notes below the video. Philyaw also turned some of the drawings she’d created for the video into a children’s picture book, which is now on sale on amazon.com.
Tempchin said he doesn’t care if he makes any money off the project. He just produced it so pandemic-weary people would have something to lift their spirits during an otherwise dreary holiday season.
“Everybody seems to enjoy the video and the song a lot,” he said. “I think people need something family-oriented and light right now.”
The gingerbread project was also a welcome distraction for Tempchin, who normally performs about 50 local concerts a year and 25 to 30 more on the road. Tempchin said 2020 started well. He spent a week last winter writing songs with singer-songwriter Michael McDonald and was three cities into a national tour when the pandemic shut down the music industry in March.
“Not getting to play music with other human beings has been hard,” he said.
To keep busy, Tempchin has been at work on numerous online projects. In June, he launched “Three Jacks,” a new podcast where in each episode he plays three of his songs and explains the stories behind them. He beefed up his technical know-how so he could host several concerts on Facebook Live and Instagram. He hosted several episodes of Gregory Page’s Vimeo video series “Almost Live.” And he created a contest with a $1,000 prize for singers who send him videos of themselves covering his songs.
Tempchin has also been writing new music inspired by the pandemic. Last spring, he and Page co-wrote the song “Six Feet Apart” and he just finished another song about making the best of life in quarantine called “More of Less.”
“It goes ‘Less is more, so they say, and man that’s really true today. So kick on back, give your soul a rest and find yourself a little more of less,’ ” Tempchin said. “What it’s about is finding the meaning of life in small things.”
pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com