humor

Me and Hank

After finishing The Gathering, I was directionless. No idea what to do. Also, the week has been getting long and while the dog has been pretty well-behaved and accommodating of my musical endeavors, I’ve been getting tired early. I came up with the basic hook of the song and then decided that that was good enough. It’s time for bed. I was asleep before 11pm, which is a rarity. Even better, Olive let me sleep through the night. Olive is a Berger Picard,2behr-ZHAY … Continue reading

Don’t Fight the Funk

I wrote fairly extensively about “Other Ray” in I’m Back (And I’m Backin’ It Up!) – the last time he showed up. I can’t say specifically what prompted this track, but I can tell you that I was procrastinating so hard. I really didn’t want to write any music. I wrote a blog post, I surfed the web, I looked at my archival process… With midnight fast approaching, I finally knuckled down and tried to find something interesting to do. I had a basic drum loop going and was futzing around with some synth patch when I correctly (and accidentally) … 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

Who Can It Be Now?

Every now and then I “get serious” about making this site a little better and ticking off some of those “I should do that some day” boxes. After the GDPR went into effect, we all started getting those wonderful cookie pop-ups on every single friggin’ web site. You know the ones “We use cookies. If you use this site, you’re agreeing to this.” Never mind that they probably already set the cookies. At least some sites give you the ability to turn some cookies off, notably the tracking and advertising ones. Before we go any further, let me be very … Continue reading

Relativity

One month. Four weeks. 28 days. 40,320 minutes during which the 30-odd Song-A-Day participants that gather on any given year write music. A lot of music. More music than many of us might have thought we had in us in total, much less annually. And yet, here we are with thousands of songs and recordings behind us. A famous quotation about the theory of relativity, often attributed to Einstein, but probably just a good anecdotal joke by a reporter goes like this: When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when … Continue reading