The new song book

The ideas that wind up in my lyrics are often the crystallized short-hand of symbols, icons, idioms, slang, and historical reference. The appeal for me is that the allusion says more than I could ever fit into a lyric structure using the wordy scattershot of my speaking voice. These references aren’t intended as a puzzle for an audience to decipher (not to say that isn’t valid too), but rather to inject the songs with the fable of my experience. They are essentially journal entries after all.

I’ve been thinking about ways to set the lyrics on a page with jotted notes for quite a while. Perhaps the idea’s genesis was in reading the fantastic liner notes to Bob Seeger’s Greatest Hits, in which he revisits each tune and writes a short introduction. I’ve been interested in a spin off for various reasons, but the natural way to have lyrics and thoughts together is also the most difficult way to design it – to have side notes. After a lot of stalling and a few misfires, I decided to move forward with a div layout called the 1kb grid. It’s astounding what people put out there for free.

Anyway, worst case scenario, I’ve allowed encyclopedia junk to ruin these songs for everyone else. And yet my hope is to have the best of both worlds: to write things that are poetic enough to avoid alienating listeners (I’m commercial that way) and interesting enough to me that I won’t hate them before I’m done recording. Then I can write We’ll be Yellow and Blue like the Big Bang in the The Starry Night and journal the things I was thinking about when I wrote it.

In this case, that the sky in Van Gogh’s Starry Night resembles an earlier sketch of the Whirlpool Galaxy (and in turn, much about various galaxies is traced back as and supposed as evidence for the Big Bang).

News

Supernova lyricsmp3

I worked on this tune on-and-off for two years, finding that the keyboards fought the rhythm or the lyrics were too sparse or the key had to change. I'm glad I kept at it. The horns are part of the base package in FL Studio.

I Can’t Go On Pretendinglyricsmp3

Every so often a song seems to write itself, and this song is one of a pair that I hold above all others. It’s mostly a list of the questions I had as a child, outgrew, and then grew back into. I will write more, but this is what I’ve always wanted to say.

Other news

I still add the occasional change to the Austin Open Mic list.

“Heartbreaking songs about love...
a welcome musical present” - College Times