humor

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

Spicy Bee

Ever hear a song and think, “What could possibly have made him write that? Did someone dare him?” Well, in this case, you would be right. Actually, it was half-dare and half-threat. And it all came out of a semi-drunken afternoon. The time: Early Pandemic Stupidity Era. The place: my front yard. The suspects: me, Mary (my wife) and our neighbors, Mary and Brian (hereafter inconsistently referred to as “Freighbors.”) When the lockdowns all started and everyone was basically living my beautiful shut-in lifestyle and not working all that much, we would occasionally set up our lawn chairs at the … Continue reading

Just Kidding

I’m not sure exactly how to write about this one, because it might not stay. I wrote the lyrics and recorded the entire thing on January 31 for my father’s birthday. Not only does it fit the “written and recorded in one day” criteria for Song-A-Day, but it was written on a day I might legitimately have done something to post as my February 1 entry. There is a brief writeup about this in my article Older Than the Planets, but I thought I’d write just a bit more about the process as well as what prompted me to post … Continue reading