Happy fall!!! At least technically. It’s still pretty hot here today. But it is the start of fall. I have no idea what that means. I’m headed to Texas this week, to the Southwest Regional Folk Alliance Conference (or SWRFA, if you’re feeling hip). It should be three days of not sleeping, playing music, hanging … [Read more…]
If Darrell Scott played guitar in your band at a club show on a Saturday night, everyone who heard it would swear he was the best guitar player they had ever heard. If he sang at that gig, they would swear he was the best singer they had ever heard. If he played his songs, … [Read more…]
I grew up with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. If you aren’t from Minnesota we’ll forgive you for not knowing what that is. Click the link. Later on, I heard the John Henry story, probably in the Johnny Cash version, but there are so many versions. The John Henry story is an archetypal American … [Read more…]
Someone asked me a while back, “what’s your songwriting process?” I think I mumbled, ‘uh, I dunno, I write stuff and sometimes it rhymes, and sometimes I figure out how to play guitar to it.’ Which sounds like the kind of thing Ray Wylie Hubbard would say (which secretly is exactly what I’m trying to … [Read more…]
Ray Wylie Hubbard, who has taken to writing loooong and really entertaining Facebook posts, included a song suggestion in a post not too long ago. I’m a big fan of his, so I just couldn’t resist following his instructions and seeing how it came out. Here are his instruction reproduced exactly: So there you go- … [Read more…]
So I posted the Flood Update a while back. In between finding a more stable place to spend our exile from home, talking to FEMA (I feel like I have a close personal relationship with a government agency), trying to have half a normal life (getting the kid to school, getting myself to work, helping … [Read more…]
I’ve been taking an online songwriting class the past few weeks, which has been pretty cool. It’s has been a chance to learn some vocabulary for talking about the mechanics of songwriting and thinking about how to make all the pieces of a song work together. No radical breakthroughs, nor did I have any lighting … [Read more…]