In the Studio

Just a quick note: Shelle and I will be recording with producer Jimmy Ether on 12/26. It was just over a year year ago when I recorded six tracks with Jimmy (as I wrote about here), expecting the cruise right through a series of demos and an EP. Since then, he's built a new studio and we've cooled our heels, focusing more on writing and performing than on recording. With this year's sessions, though, we expect to complete the work we started last December and (we hope) lay the groundwork for an LP in 2008. So send us happy holiday recording vibes, if you think of it!

Visions and Revisions

What writer doesn't love Eliot's formulation in "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" about "visions and revisions"? And who doesn't wish he had time for hundred before tea?

I'm sure I wasn't alone in my sophomore days as a writer in coming down on the "Visions" side of the equation. I thought writing -- especially writing songs -- was 99% inspiration and only 1% perspiration (as the cliché has it). I'd get ideas and furiously write them down as they came to me, reaching for the rhymes a bit, but mostly taking the ideas down in a steady stream. The real challenge from there was to make the music work with the text. Thus, the songs that worked the best for me were ones in which music and lyric came at the same time and inspiration at least did me the favor a following a consistent rhythm and rhyme scheme.

Over time, though, I've come to appreciate how much craft and technique lies behind the art. I still don't fully subscribe to "rules" about making a good song, but understanding how to write a "three-minute movie" song -- that is, how to write a typical hook-based song -- is invaluable to knowing how to write something different when you want to. It's like making sure you really understand the five-paragraph essay before you try to break away from it. To be perfectly honest, when I got to college, I abandoned the standard essay structure so completely, I went from always getting "A"s in English to getting "B"s and "C"s for a couple of years. Similarly, there are ways in which the little songs I wrote when I was 15 and 16 were better than some things I wrote after getting "serious" about songwriting.

About over a decade ago I found myself hanging around with some really good poets. I had the opportunity to observe them writing and revising and to participate in conversations about what made a passage or a line or a word better and what made things worse. I learned how to take (some) criticism without getting pissed off, what hard work revision is, and how to try to make things more concrete, more vivid. On the other hand, I also developed a tendency toward overly-philosophical themes and highfalutin language that I wouldn't shake for years to come.

Here's a revision I made around that time. My song "So Many People" used to start like this:

You're goddamn right! I shot 'em all.
I got me a handgun and went straight to the mall.

In order to make it more specific, more vivid, I changed it to

You're goddamn right! I shot 'em all.
Bought a gun at a pawn shop, took a cab to the mall.

Doesn't change the sense of the line one whit: the plot advances in exactly the same way, with the character acquiring a gun and heading to the mall (where he's fixin' to do some damage). But the revised version gives us some important detail and tells us a little something about the character. (Where I'm from, if you go to a pawn shop for a gun and take a cab to the mall, you're low status. A rich guy would already have a gun or buy it at a sporting goods store, and then he'd drive to the mall.)

With regard to the relationship between vision and revision, those two factors can meet across a gap of time. I often have an idea for a song, maybe a partial chorus or a couple of lines, but I don't have much time to spend on it. Some years back, I would have either written the whole song or just let it drop. Now I write what I can as quickly as I can, and then put it away. I look back over my fragments periodically to keep them percolating in the back of my mind, but other than that I don't worry too much about it. I've learned to trust this "vision" stage to develop on its own and to not feel anxious about not finishing songs.

The song "Victimless Crime" started with a pretty simple idea: I was driving by a wreck on the highway and thinking about how hard it is for people not to look, and I had the idea to juxtapose that image with a "hit and run" relationship, maybe with the victim sitting in the corner of a bar. So I came up with a few lines -- "He sees the car crash in the corner, but he's pretending not to notice." And right away I at least had a little bit of a story and a couple of characters. I probably heard the term "Victimless Crime" on the news in some context while I was driving by the wreck, because the phrase was already in my mind, and I wanted it to use it to ironically -- a character insisting, in the very presence of his victim, that his was a victimless crime.

After jotting down half a verse and half a chorus, though, I let it sit for weeks without even thinking about it. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea in my mind, and I started the hundred visions and revisions that would eventually become the song. The final (and hardest) major revision was to get rid of the idea that led to the song in the first place. I had changed "He sees the car crash in the corner" to "He sees the wreckage in the corner," but I finally faced up to reason, and the first stanza became:

He sees her sitting in the corner
But he's pretending not to notice
He likes to think she's none the worse for wear.
He turns back for another drink
And disregards the damage
Wondering why the hell she's even there.

I came to realize the crash imagery worked against the song, making it harder for the listener to understand the setting. It's one thing to add information gradually -- we don't really know it's a bar until "He turns back for another drink." But when a song opens with a confusing or nonsensical image, the "poetic" conceit often isn't worth the disorientation. Or put differently, expecting your listener to get from a car crash to a bar stool that quickly might stretch things a bit. In the end, the vision that gave rise to the song became a burden to the more important characters and story line, and it took some heavy-handed revision to clear away the unnecessary parts.

I'll leave it there rather than going through draft after draft and line after line. But next time, I think I'll write about a completely different kind of songwriting: starting with the music, picking a line purely for it's rhythm to work through the melody, and then letting the words sort of coalesce around that initial phrase.

Feast and Famine

Back at the beginning of November I started but never finished a post about a song I had recently completed called "Stay Close to Me." I just reread the paragraphs I wrote, and it's interesting to look back at that time when I was coming out of a long dry spell and had just finished a "good" song. I had a few blog posts prior to that and had hoped to keep writing about writing, but now I can honestly say I've been pouring my writing energy into songs instead of blogging: Since Summer's end, I've written five complete songs, and I've started at least as many and left them in various states of completion. Some of those will become complete songs, others will die away and never see the light of day. But I think it's safe to say my creativity has gone from a slow drip to a steady stream over a couple of months.

Who can say what triggers these things? If you know me, you won't be surprised to learn that I've had a marked increase in migraine activity during this time, averaging two headaches a week since I started keeping track in early November. But there's always a chicken and egg question there, and a general increase in creative activity doesn't always translate into more and better songs.

As much as anything, I think I benefited from some workshops I did this Fall with fourth and fifth graders. Every year, each class in my kids' school performs a song for an annual "Peace Celebration" in January. This year, my son's teacher decided to let some of the kids have a crack at writing their song themselves. With some help.

We agreed that I would work out a basic structure and melody ahead of time, and then conduct sessions with the kids to help them write lyrics. The kids worked very hard, coming up with pages and pages of rhyming couplets on their own, and then we worked as a group to select, edit, and refine lyrics that made sense together and fit the music. After three sessions, we had a pretty good draft of the song, and after just some minor revisions to smooth out a line here or there, I was able to give them a demo recording to rehearse with.

They (and their teacher) report having enjoyed the process and being proud of the results. But what I didn't count on was how great it was for me! Teaching songwriting to fourth and fifth graders somehow flipped a switch in my brain that really helped me in my own writing.

Working with the kids, I couldn't just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Instead, we had to approach songwriting in a very straightforward, practical way and use techniques to quickly work through problems and get on with it. So, for example, if we got stuck on a line, we would start brainstorming rhymes or ways of restating a line to create an easier rhyme (if that was the problem). We'd just write all the ideas on the board until something jumped out as the best answer. I've started using these same kinds of strategies in my own writing and damn if they don't work just as well for me as they did for nine and ten year olds!

We like to think of songwriting as this transcendental process in which disembodied voices speak through the writer directly into the purest art. The truth is, even when song seems to "write itself" in the first draft, I think most songwriters revise and rework the text through at least another draft or two to make them better. I think for my next post (or next couple of posts) I'll give some examples of this process -- show some "revision maps" of song fragments and talk about what I was thinking and why I made the changes.

Here's a list of my new songs, just for the heck of it:

• Stay Close to Me
• Victimless Crime
• In My Arms Tonight
• Without a Trace
• The Stone is Heavy

Library Show

The Patrick Bryant Trio played at the Decatur Library last night, and from where I stood, it was a great show. Not that our performance was just sublimely beautiful or anything, but the venue was nice and the audience was fantastic, and there was just a happy confluence of factors that made everything feel "right." In fact, on our side, there were some goofy gaffs, such as me completely blowing the lyrics to a song I wrote over 15 years ago or my own cell phone ringing loudly in the middle of the quietest moment of "Moonshiner," but it was the kind of audience that would let us joke through that kind of thing and move on without much embarrassment.

There were a couple of high spots for me in this show. "Moonshiner," had it not been for the ringing phone, felt very nice. There's something haunting about Shelle's harmony on that song, the way her pure voice contrasts with the desperation of the speaker, who's saying "when the bottle gets empty, [life] ain't worth a damn." Last night we had her microphone good and loud so she could sing with the quiet nuance she needs and still be heard. It gave me chills. Also, I thought our "She Walked Away" was the very best we've performed it. I wish I'd had tape rolling, because I'd like to remember the exact pacing: somehow we just hit the right groove, and it felt great.

For me, the most important moment was debuting a new song: "Stay Close to Me." I was unusually nervous about playing it, for some reason. Maybe because it's the first song of significance (to me) I've written in a long time. It's a lot easier to perform songs that are laid back or tongue-in-cheek or ironic. But this one tries to capture something like straightforward emotion, and the only way to perform it is all out, and I felt like if it flopped, I'd feel like I was pretty much standing there naked. But it was received warmly, I thought, and I was relieved and immensely grateful.

If you were there, thanks!

Here's what we played:

Louis Collins
I Didn't Feel
Novocaine
101 Degrees
Pain Rhymes So Good
Moonshiner
A 'Rovin On a Winter's Night
Falling
Fish Hook
Stay Close to Me
NC2U
Waves
She Walked Away

Getting Closer

The other day, I explored the reasons for my hiatus from songwriting (and the parallel hiatus from blogging about songwriting). I could mention that I've also stopped writing in my journal and stopped drawing compulsively and stopped playing my guitar almost constantly, reserving the latter for the last week or two before a show. I started that post with no idea that's what I wanted to write about, let alone where I was going to come out on the issue. Today I reread the post, and I think it's only about half to two-thirds crap.

I think I'm getting close to the mark when I talk about the emotional toll songwriting can take, and maybe even the notion that I needed a rest after such a long period of creativity, but all the stuff about just sort of ignoring the ideas and what not? I don't know; that sounds pretty fishy to me.

Maybe what I mean is, there's material all around me that I could be writing songs about, but I prefer not to acknowledge it. I prefer to turn away. Mind you, I'm not talking about the plight of the underprivileged or corruption or that kind of thing. It's dead easy to look outward and get preachy. It may not be easy to write well about it, but at least it's easy to contemplate it; it's even satisfying. Rather, I'm talking about hard things: looking inward and facing personal things I'd rather ignore.

I reckon most of my non-writing for these months has stemmed more from avoidance than from exhaustion. I make it sound like all good songwriting is like therapy. On the contrary, I suspect a lot of really bad songwriting is like therapy. My songs that consistently get the best response from audiences are the ones that are a bit funny rather than deep, probing, electric wire plugged into your soul kinds of things. But I know that I can't properly write lighter stuff if I can't confront the heavy.

This all seems to contradict the posts that really started off this blog, in which I talked about the mis-impression people have about songs being confessional. And here I am, two posts in a row, talking about how hard (or exhausting) it can be to be too confessional. Maybe I can reconcile this, maybe not.

When I say that I'm turning away from things around me, I'm talking about being unwilling to confront various personal issues and see where they lead in my writing. "Shudder," "She Walked Away," "Terminal," "Dawn" -- these are all songs (just a few among many) that started in a deeply personal place but which, thanks to voice and character and metaphor and other normal art things are also comfortably distant. They affect me in performance in the same way "Moonshiner" (traditional) or "Pueblo Waltz" (Townes Van Zandt) or any other good song affects me: not as intrinsic parts of myself but as songs I especially like that have special meaning for me. "Falling," I have to admit, was a little closer to the bone, and it was a long time to before I could perform it. I kept putting it on set lists and then dropping it at the last minute. But now it, too, is a thing apart; a song that I perform as a sort of character rather than remaining entirely myself.

Yet I haven't written anything really hard since "Falling." By the way, I wrote "Pain Rhymes so Good" at roughly the same time that I wrote "Falling." Funny how I wrote a song about being too happy to write sad songs at the same time that I wrote a song about lovers making each other feel invisible. For me to write well, I now realize, I can't be afraid of the dark. Regardless of whether I'm writing light or heavy songs, I have to be open to things that worry or frighten or depress me. It's easy to try to be analytical about other people's dark stuff, but unless I can relate to something in a personal way, it's hard for me to write about it convincingly. So the hard thing for me is looking at my own stuff and trying to be harsh enough, honest enough to see what's really there. I don't succeed that often, and recently I haven't really felt like looking. But I'm trying, and the songs are coming again.

Most of the songs mentioned in this post are available via the "Demo" widget. I haven't ever put "Falling" on the Web though. Here it is:

Blogging Songwriting

My last published entry here is about why I hadn't written anything in awhile, and it talks about how busy I'd been with work and coaching little league and so forth. Today I came here to do a quick post about how I've been too busy to post anything, and I thought, wow, little league just started again (this time the Fall season), and work is as busy as ever, and school's just started back for the kids, and I can go on and on.

The thing is, you either do something or you don't do it. At one point, I did "blogging"; clearly, at another point, I stopped it. If I'm honest, the same is true of songwriting. For most of 2006, I couldn't stop myself from writing songs. I wrote more songs in 2006 than I wrote in the previous 15 years put together, probably. But that fire hose of creativity has been more of a drinking straw for most of this year. And I ask myself, "what happened?"

But I know what happened. My creative impulses didn't stop firing, I didn't stop having ideas. I just stopped paying attention to them, probably around the time I started blogging about why I wasn't blogging. In some ways, writing songs just stopped being a priority for awhile. There are lots of good reasons for that. For one thing, they were kind of piling up, and I was starting to feel like I should make the ones I've already got better (yeah, that sounds weak to me too). But mainly, I have a pretty full life, and compulsive songwriting tends sometimes to drain my attention and energy away from other things that really matter to me.

If I'm honest, though, there's also this other thing. The deep emotional toll that writing can take, when I write the way "I most want to write" (as Melville called it). At our last show, someone asked about one that's tough to play off: a song I've called in the past "A Metaphor in Search of a Song" but I've retitled simply "Falling." I used to really hedge my bets on that song, telling people it came out of my trying to describe how a migraine felt (which is a version of the truth, but it's certainly not the whole truth). It's more accurate, though more surprising if you hear "Falling," for me to call it a love song. That's a surprising description because it's about the hard parts of real, lived love, the times where you don't always connect, where you see past each other, where you don't quite feel liked by your lover.

So the question naturally arises, is it autobiographical? As the audience member asked Shelle after the show, "were you guys going through a rough time when he wrote that?" If this can make any sense at all, that question is both beside the point and it is precisely the point. It's beside the point because there's no key to understanding the song that lies in a specific event, no hidden meaning waiting to be teased out by a secret life experience. It is what it is, and I hope it describes something that can be understood pretty universally by anyone who's been in a real relationship for any amount of time.

On the other hand, if it does resonate with people, it can only be because it tells the truth in some way, comes from somewhere authentic. So in that respect, the question of it's relationship to my life (or to our life, in this case) could be uncomfortably close to the mark. Shelle and I have been together for nearly twenty years, and if you think every day of that has been sunny, maybe you live in the Magic Kingdom. It should come as no great shock that a deep, abiding love yields material for complex, sometimes dark songs. But we don't ordinarily go around shining flashlights into the dark corners of our personal lives and asking people to look at them, contemplate them, compare them to their own secret corners. And of course that's not exactly what I'm doing anyway. You start with something true, then you play around with character and voice and so forth to make it work. Even with the distance and the defense of fiction, though, it can feel pretty exposed.

It looks like I've gone way around my ass to get to my elbow, but I think I'm circling back around. What I've been driving toward is this: any kind of personal writing takes a toll. I've been making excuses about not blogging, but what's been going on here is a bit of a murky mirror of what's been going on in other aspects of my creative life. It takes a lot of time, sure, but time isn't the main thing that's kept me away from writing. As soon as a song you're working on spills off the page and into the air, you become aware of reactions. It takes effort to tune out your censor who's worried about other people's feelings and just focus on the story you're trying to tell, trusting that it will be OK. My family understands this, and they give me the distance I need to write, but somehow I feel really tired anyway after a long time of productivity.

Why am I writing all this now? Because I feel that I'm waking up from a long period of "rest." My censors are falling away and the ideas are nagging me with greater urgency. I'm writing down more, taking things further, and worrying less than I have over the past months, in spite of being "busier" than I have been. So maybe I'll finally start blogging again. Time will tell, I guess.

Update

Wow, long time no post! My real job (the one where I actually get paid for writing) has been mighty time-consuming of late, and Spring little-league is upon us, with all that that implies.

Anyway, thought I'd write up a quickie about what little bit we've got going on musically. I'm still trying to squeeze in another date with Jimmy E. to finish up the EP. It's all on me, basically; he's usually Delta -- ready when we are. Performance-wise, Blake Guthrie invited me to join him at 4:00 on Sunday, March 18th at Aurora Coffee in L5P (next to Criminal Records) for an afternoon songwriters gig. I've done a similar show he hosted at Java Monkey, and it was great, so I can't wait.

Also, the big Northwoods Spring Carnival is coming up. This is a fundraiser for my kids' Montessori school, and it's become traditional for me to put together a band to play in the parking lot. It's also traditional for me to wait until the last minute and then throw it together badly! So I'm right on track with that. Matt's already on board to play bass (of course), so I'll probably just scare up a drummer and do it as a three-piece. It's huge fun because we play a lot of covers, which I rarely do at my shows.

Finally, I have a couple of house shows brewing, and I'm talking to Bill at the Redlight about another show there either in April or May, so of course I'll announce on my events page when any of that comes to fruition.

Meantime, watch here for some new downloads. When I get the time, I'll post some more advanced material from the EP, just to prove I'm not making it all up!

Peace,
Patrick

Redlight Report

A week ago tonight "The Patrick Bryant Trio" played at Atlanta's Redlight Cafe, and although I should pretend like it was nothing special -- just another in a long line of successful gigs, I gotta say: it was extraordinary. Our playing was probably no better than usual (though I hope no worse), and frankly, there were reasons to be annoyed, like the freezing temperatures in the venue and the free-floating time slot. But what made the show stand out so much was first the really excellent and professionally mixed sound system, and most importantly, the amazing audience.

I was excited about this show from the get-go for nostalgic reasons. Over a decade ago, we used to play the Redlight about once a month or so as "Adam's Cat," and even before that as "The Kilngods." So I worked hard to let as many people as possible know about this show. You might even say I was a bit aggressive, cornering people one-on-one or in small groups and inviting them to the show, making a general nuisance of myself until I wore down their resistance. But people did not disappoint me! Not only did those faithful friends who often come out to hear us turn up, but folks from work and church and old jobs; people that I haven't seen in years and people I've only just met heard about the show and came out on a freezing cold night and sat in a cold venue and listened to us play a 90 minute set of songs most of them had never heard.

If you've not been on the other side of the monitors, you may not understand what an amazing gift it is to have your own material listened to and appreciated. Over the years, I've learned that an audience has done its job by showing up and paying the cover charge. Once you take the stage, it's all up to you; they're under no great obligation to like you or listen to you or even be particularly quiet. It can be a terrifying thing to stand there and play song after song that you've written and that your audience doesn't know. Certainly you don't risk a barrage of rotten vegetables; it's something much worse you have to fear: their indifference. I've been there before, and it turns your guts to ice water. So when I say I appreciate not just the size and diversity but also the warmth and attention of Friday night's audience, you will understand that I'm not offering a perfunctory "thanks y'all." I'm talking about something fundamental to why I do this in the first place. I'm talking about why music matters to me, why I write and perform songs, why I care.

Here are some pics from the show:

Stuff

In recent weeks, I've been rather busy with the writing I do for my day job (which is technical), and I haven't had much time to write about what's been going on music-wise. But I have a moment or two of down time, so I thought I'd so a little newsy "here's what's up" post.

1. Recording
   Not much to report. Since we had to cancel a session before the holidays, everyone's been too busy to schedule anything. My next big plan is to get the whole trio together with the producer and record "She Walked Away" (which, after all, is the main track for the EP), but that takes more coordinating than just me taking a couple hours off. We'll try to get that together by mid-February at the latest.
   


2. Songwriting
   I have been writing a lot of songs, or at least parts of songs. It's like a faucet I can't turn off: they just keep coming. Most of the ideas I have end up on the dust heap, or at best end up as half a song in my journal, something I'll look at later when I have time and see if there's enough there to develop. But I have written or rewritten a few complete songs that I'm happy with, so I keep tinkering with the live set list and re-conceiving the layout of the EP. Good thing we're behind on recording, I guess.



3. Shows
   Redlight Cafe, February 2nd. I'm really excited about this show: Years ago, when my band was "Adam's Cat," we played the Redlight all the time. It's still run by the same proprietor, and it's still a great music venue. If you're in Atlanta, come a little early (we start at 8:00) and let's have a great time!



4. New Site
   I was so tickled by the redesign here, I updated MediumLoud to more or less match. It's really a thinly-concealed blog, which makes it a bit easier for me to update and shifts the server load to Google. Hope you like it!
   



5. T-Shirts
   And finally, I've opened a T-Shirt Store over at Cafe Press just for the heck of it. The design is based on the poster I did for the Redlight show, and I just thought it was cool so I made a shirt from it. Of course, the advantage of CP is, I don't have to cough up any money up front for the shirts like I would with a screen printing shop. They use direct print technology, and it's really high-quality stuff -- not just a cheesy iron-on. Proceeds (such as they are) go to defray recording costs.
   

-Peace!

New Design

As you will have noticed, I bowed to the blandishments of new blogger layout tools, the complaints of a number of folks that they can't see the text on my blog very well, and my own desire to "turn on the lights." As part of the re-design, I changed the URL (it's a long story, but it amounts to making it easier for me to deal with and putting most of the load back on Google). So, on the off chance that you've linked to the old URL, please update to http://blog.mediumloud.com

Lemme know how you like it!

Update: I'm redesigning my main page too: MediumLoud.com It also uses blogger now (which means there's a little delay as it re-directs. Also, I'm updating this to get this back at the top of the feed because apparently I edited an old post and whacked the sort order. Grr.

She Cut Her Hair

According to my journal, "She Cut Her Hair" was the working title of "She Walked Away" in the early weeks of its life. I was playing on Billy Bragg's version of "Walk Away Renee" which ends, "And then one day it happened: she cut her hair and I quit loving her." The concept of the song, at that stage, was to portray the end of a relationship that would have no lasting effect on the characters involved. It's narrated from the male point of view (though not first person), and he's left standing there contemplating not the meaning of life, but trivia, such as "a taste in his mouth." In the earliest version, he wonders if the taste might be a new lip gloss.

The song continued in that vein, with the man's detachment growing as the literal distance increases between them. As he "feels himself forgetting" the little unexplained lover's memories -- "the museum, the parking lot, those jeans she'd always wear" (at one point it was "the museum, the ferry ride, those awful bands she loved") -- her impact on his life seems to be fading from his consciousness along with those memories.

Then came a clearly-defined turning point: I wrote in my journal about "listening to Graceland"; a lyric from that song changed my "She Walked Away" (as I was by then calling it). Paul Simon sang, "losing love is like a window in your heart: Everybody sees you're blown apart." And I realized what I was trying to write was a lie.

Or at least it was not emotionally honest to pretend that two people could just walk away without any damage. It might make for a clever song, maybe even an interesting song, but it wasn't the basis for a true song. The influence of the Graceland lyric is direct. The first change I made was to add the bridge:

Maybe they'll both feel the damage
Maybe they'll be blown apart
Maybe he'll fell so transparent
Like the world can see his heart.

The rest of the changes were pretty small. It didn't take much from there to suggest that the character is engaging in wishful thinking by trying to convince himself that it won't matter. But changing the tone of the song also helped a number of the images coalesce and provided the sense of disorientation I needed for the refrain -- "How should he feel?" and "He knows it's not real?"

I said above that before changing the song it wasn't true, yet I've said in an earlier post that this song isn't literally about me. So here's why that's not a contradiction. Of course I've had my share of "walking away" scenes in my life, and I certainly drew on bits of my own history for the song. Because of where and who I was in my life as I wrote the song, I think I had a lot invested in construing things as if those scenes had had no impact on my life, certainly no lasting impact. I remember hearing Bono years ago make a long, rambling speech upon receipt of some Grammy or another. He said writing good music was fundamentally about the decision to reveal rather than to conceal. Always seemed odd to me, but I finally understood it, I think, when I changed this song. I think he meant that it's not good enough to tell yourself, "this isn't about me" and write a bit of fluff. I guess, if you want to write a song that's true, you have to start by being truthful with yourself. To write this song, I had to risk a little bit of transparency; I had to be willing to admit that I had felt the damage, and that in some ways, maybe I still do.

Had a Post . . .

Big and strong /
Turned around and found my blog post gone.

(Sung to the tune of Jane's Addiction's "Had a Dad," if you didn't pick up the reference).

I wrote a very long, very personal installment in the "She Walked Away" series, but it fell through the crack between the bed and the wall. Or more precisely, it fell through the crack made by the upgrade to the new version of Blogger and its interaction with my post editing software. So I'm bummed, and I can't quite face trying to reconstruct it yet. So forgive me for being so tardy in my posting. It's not for want of caring about you, dear reader.

While I'm rambling, I might as well mention: I thinking I'm going to reinstate my old blog, "I Shudder to Think" to write about general music and songwriting things -- stuff not directly related to this recording project. I wrote a new song this week called "Voices" (which I'll probably play Wednesday at Java Monkey), so maybe I'll write something about that over there. We'll see. blah blah blah. I have a headache. Guess I should go back to work.


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