composition

Here at the End of All Things

No, it’s not really the end of anything, other than this very delayed wrap-up post for Song-A-Day 2025. Many of the blog entries were written over the last several weeks. Clearly I lost the energy to keep talking about it while doing it and I’ll say more about that a little later. How Did It Go? It was a solid year. I didn’t reach any new plateaus, nor did I suffer any setbacks or meltdowns. That’s not to say that I wasn’t challenged every day. When I go through the folder for the month, there are several days where I … Continue reading

Predator

Yesterday’s track ultimately became a reminder of one of the most effective cards I’ve ever gotten from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards: Don’t avoid what’s easy. And in that spirit, we arrive at today’s track. Because … Continue reading

Edgar Rescues the Damsel of Garstaang Tower

Many blog posts ago, going back perhaps 15 to 20 years, I wrote about a condition I had both invented and decided I suffer from: Salieri Syndrome. I have alternatively described myself as “praying to St. Salieri.” In days past, most people would have immediately gotten the reference, but as I sat down to write this post, I now realize that it’s a reference to a 41 year old movie.1Or a 46 year old play, if you want to be pedantic. Or even more than that, as Amadeus was, itself, based on the 1830 play Mozart and Salieri by Alexander … Continue reading

Olive’s First Snow

Today was even more of a “my mind is blank” day than yesterday. After a couple of hours of false starts, I started wondering if maybe I’m out of steam. I don’t want to write about anything current or political because… well, I just don’t want to deal with the intolerance of people who disagree with me and I’ve found that a lot of the stuff I do in that direction isn’t as incisive or poetic as I’d like it to be. I’m not recharged enough for another ambient or cinematic piece. Joy in the Snow We’d had a decent … Continue reading

Theme from a Sitcom You Never Saw

Because I write in a wide variety of styles, I get a lot of “you should do a [$GENRE] song!” Sometimes these are intriguing challenges, and sometimes I have to politely say, “hey, yeah, maybe,” while internally knowing that it will never happen either because I don’t have any clue how to do it, or because I know that the end result probably isn’t going to be as satisfying as the person thinks it will be. This isn’t limited to my friends, though. The Song-A-Day folks will occasionally throw out a song prompt or challenge: Disco Monday; Write in Locrian … Continue reading