music | words | ideas | and other things I find amazing!
Recording with Reaper for Songwriters I’m back at Songsalive! Orange County for another workshop. Rather than technology tools or social media and promotional strategies, I’m going to cover how to record yourself using Reaper – the popular DAW from Cockos. My goal toward the end of last year was to work on the professionalism on […]
How a cowgirl and broken-hearted crush wrote a song She’s thinkin’, as he’s leavin’ “Ain’t it somethin’ this relief I’m feeling” There ain’t no broken heart in sight So she saddles up for a midnight ride Hoof-beats match her heart beat stride for stride Her life gets a little clearer tonight Back in 2007/2008 I […]
I was listening to Joe Pug’s Podcast, The Working Songwriter Podcast. I’ve gone back to listen to quite a few of them. I discovered a few things: Josh Ritter stammers a lot – or did in that interview. His songwriting is spectacular. James McMurtry is a pretty dry interview. Steve Earle knows a lot of […]
Heading things off at the pass, as this question has already come up… No, there is no Marie. But the named worked well with the song. Actually, there is a Marie at my client and she seems to like the song. It’s certainly not the first song to use her name. But there was no specific […]
“Writer’s believe they have something to say but are surprised as hell when anyone reads them.” I can’t recall where I read the quote above. And to be honest, that’s probably a butchered paraphrase. But the idea is solid. It’s a strange confidence when you know you write well; both the way you write (your […]
I’m booking house concerts for 2017I used to do a series of house concerts a couple times a year. They took me from Los Angeles to Chicago and back. Now I have friends and fans that can take me from Los Angeles probably all the way to Washington DC and back. But I’d love to […]
Live streaming a few songs As part of my annoyance with holding back on live video and a number of other goals, I am doing more live streams on Facebook. To date, they’ve been me in the hills with my dogs and playing music. I’ve been launching them from my Facebook profile but realized that […]
A song about love and obsession I wrote this in the early 1990’s.. I was married at the time. The first time I played it, my wife was in a bible study at church with about 50 other women. I drove up to the church, walked in with my guitar, and played it for her. […]
One of my goals is to integrate as much of my professional and creative world as possible. As a writer, performer, speaker, and technologist. This is a natural part of who I am. I’ve never wanted to create the “professional me” versus the “creative me” versus the “personal me.” I sincerely try, in all endeavors, to […]
Cure My Lonely is a song that captures the idea of a love that you cannot hold on to, cannot sustain, but find impossible to walk away from. I was not living that reality at the time. I was drawing on common themes of love, obsession, loss, and weakness.