A local musician and music teacher has earned an honorable mention in the International Songwriting Competition for his funny song about a clock.

Now Glenn Lestz will perform “The Clock” and other songs with his band Pink Camel at Issaquah’s International Music Day, on June 21.

“The Clock” is a simple, 43-second song — just Lestz on vocals accompanied by his guitar — about a clock found in a trash can.

Lestz had already composed the song in GarageBand, a method he said he uses to keep track of melodies as they come into his head.

But it wasn’t until he took a songwriting class at the Kaleidoscope School under Laura Lagerstedt, in 2013, that he developed the lyrics.

“It’s kind of weird,” Lestz said. “We were just doing some exercise or other and it came out.”

Lestz had his eye on an entry into the Nashville, Tenn.-based International Song Writing Competition. His friends thought the song was funny, so he entered it into the Novelty/Comedy category.

Lestz entered the competition alongside roughly 18,000 entrants from 118 countries, split across 22 categories.

Though out of the top three for its category, winning an honorable mention was “no small achievement,” according to an email from the competition’s Founder and Director Candace Avery. A spokesman for the competition confirmed that only 10 entries received honorable mentions in the novelty/comedy category.

Lestz began playing music in 1965, when he was just a 10-year-old boy watching The Beatles play “The Ed Sullivan Show” from his living room in Roslyn, New York.

His sister played piano but a teacher deemed Lestz’s fingers too stubby and put him on the accordion.

“Then, of course, I realized guitar was all that,” Lestz said.

Music became his lifelong obsession. He graduated with a music degree from Queens College and completed management internships with three orchestras, including a stint at the Boston Pops where he coordinated a laser show for composer John Williams.

After working as arts manager for the Wichita Symphony Orchestra in Kansas, Lestz and his wife moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1986 and Lestz went into accounting — though he worked for a time with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

He began teaching music again, something he had done back east, in 1997.

Lestz will play bass with folk-rock, rhythm and blues band Pink Camel — led by Lagerstedt — on the Grape Arbor stage at Sunset Way and Front Street during Make Music Day, Issaquah’s celebration of International Music Day.