Freddy Bradburn: News

The summer is almost over. School is about to begin. Because school is about to begin, I am about to panic. So what's new.

It was a busy summer. A new CD, an excellent time at Duke University Writer's Workshop, new friends, two weeks at Wildacres, new friends, two weeks in California, danced with Minnie Mouse, new friends, new songs, and now settling in back home.

I have two upcoming show: Sat., August 19 at 8:00 p.m. in King, N.C. at Randy and Vivian Fulk's Medley Meadows.

and Sat., August 26 at 8:00 p.m. at The Crooked Door in Marion. Lisa Stevens, my friend and singing partner of many years is moving to the Chesapeake Bay and this is a farewell/send off concert.

If you are coming here from the Wildacres tunnel link and wanted to hear a sample of the CD. The best option is to go to the external links and go the CD Baby page for "Live From an Empty Room". There you can listen to two minutes of all the cuts if you would like. If you would like to buy a copy you can buy it online from CD Baby or directly from me by mailing a check to Freddy Bradburn, 395 Clear Creek Road, Marion, N.C. 28752. See you on the mountain.

The new CD featuring 15 original songs arrived a few days ago. It was recorded at Blantone Music by Steve Blanton whose house and studio is about a mile from mine. He also played electric guitar on six tracks and Lisa sings harmony on six or seven. If you would like a copy send $15, to me Freddy Bradburn at 395 Clear Creek Road, Marion, N.C.28752 and I'll pay the shipping. Below I've included the CD copy with comments on the songs and some lyrics.

Roundin Third

Wave me through, wave me on,
If I have to go down let me go down strong.
If I have to die let it be known,
I was roundin’ third and headed for home.

Written the morning my father-in-law, Woodrow Roberts died. I also often think and dedicate the song to my father who taught me how to play baseball and my lifelong friend and teammate, Bill Kehler who committed suicide in 2003.


Pink Flamingoes

And what can be sadder than a broken trampoline.

And maybe it’s the aimless snow around me blowing.
Something that is nameless, something that is going,
You never thought would go.

Inspired by a chord riff in CGDGBD tuning. It was intended for Chelsea to sing (my Teenage singer) since it is a young girl’s story, but the chorus and the mood of it seems to give it a universal feeling of loss.

Expect Nothing Less From Love

Love in our life is like the sky.
We look for our guiding star.
Sometimes it’s invisible to our eyes,
Sometimes it is too far.
But I will say whoever you are.
Expect nothing less from love.

Just real life, I guess. As I see it. (in Dropped D tuning)

My Frankenstein

Wish I had somebody. I wish I had a clone.
Then I could leave myself alone.
Stuff him with sorrow. Give him a poet’s mind.
Send him out into the world my Frankenstein.

Oh beautiful monster. Sorrow’s flesh and bone.
Now that I made you leave me alone.

Sometimes when I have trouble coming up with something to write about I just try to come up with an evocative line or two. So when I got the line about having a clone I just followed it and that’s how it turned out. I love evocative lyrics that are specific but can be interpreted a variety of ways. I’m not sure nor do I really want to know what this song means.

Little Bo

Men are men and sheep are sheep.
Love me strong and hold me deep.
Hold me strong and we will pass.
Kiss me gone into the looking glass.

I went to Las Vegas just to get to the Utah wilderness, but was struck how Las Vegas seemed like such a fake town, a cartoon town. People on the sidewalks handing out leaflets for hookers and such. I just combined the fairy tale cartoon side of Las Vegas with the darker side. The question is: Is she really Little Bo Beep?




Film Noir

Outside the night grew blacker.
As we walked to your room.
You loved me like a trash compactor
Placed in an ancient ruin.

I’m always looking for a new way to write a love song. This is another from the dark side. I just tried to build it around the most unusual similes and metaphors I could think of for love. The Film Noir chorus came a long time after I had the verses.

More Than Meets the Eye

I wrote this one morning at the Wildacres Writing Workshop after talking to friend and poet, Rebecca McClanahan who I hadn’t seen for awhile. She was one of my first inspirations as a writer. The song came out of the wonderful connections people make not often enough.



The Beautiful Cliché (The Idiom Song)

And it’s one for the money in the old rat race.
Two for the show in the old goose chase.
I was three sheets in the wind and a pillowcase, pillowcase.

This song came out of a class exercise I do in one of my classes at the community college. I wanted to construct a song made up entirely of idiomatic phrases with a twist or two.

Think Hard

I looked deep. What did I want to keep?
Did I love her all or just some.
It’s all moving too quickly,
Oh my lips are all thumbs.
Okay, she said, I could fall in love,
Or I could fall from the sky.
Are you going to catch me?
Or watch me die?
She was falling from deep inside.

I wanted this song to be like a play. A dialogue between two people who are having one of those important conversations where the man knows the next thing he says could have dire consequences. It’s a song in three acts.

Time I Wasted

You said it’s just a game, so is everything else I do.
At least the game had a name, and when I lost at least I knew.
Like playing twister with my little sister,
Well, I tell you mister. The time I wasted.

Well, I do waste a lot of time. The board games were a way to unify the song. I have a fondness for the word Ouija.

The Great Wide Open

I pinched the statue of Venus.
Right on her behind.
Nothing there between us.
The flesh and the divine.
Nothing there between us, but the ocean of time.
And the great wide open world.

Philosophically, this is it for me, I think. “I’ve got Cupid’s broken arrow lodged inside my brain.” Inspired by Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Fly My Shadow

Make my shadow out of stolen corpses
from the pauper’s grave.
Stitch their faces into the darkness.
Make me a cross with a shovel and a spade.

This is another song driven by the first two lines. I had no idea where those lines would take me or what it meant. I teach a class in Southern Class where we do family history. I talk about the grandfather I never knew who was a poor dirt farmer in Madison County, N.C. who moved his family down to work in the Cotton Mill. My father worked at the mill when he was 14 and worked until his death at 63. I live in the house I grew up in and now I’m a grandfather. The song took me there in a way.

Want What We Want

Had an old dog. Dog had a bone.
We lived in a big house all alone.
I stole his bone. He called the law.
He bit me on the ankle. I bit him on the paw.
He got a rabies shot. I dug a hole.
It was the best dog gone bone I’d ever stole.

Finding satisfaction is not easy. I like the silliness of all this attached to the seriousness of the chorus.

Nothing This Perfect

Nothing this perfect. Nothing this sublime.
It’s always passing by us.
On the outskirts of time.

Written in the fall of ’04 in the Gazebo at Wildacres Retreat. It just doesn’t get much better than that.

Busy Morning

There’s woodpeckers and Tit Mice
So watch out boys and girls.
The birdsong meets get it on.
There’s even a flying squirrel.

A silly song that has a complicated story attached to it. What might a County Commissioner’s opposition to the distribution of condoms by the health department have to do with the rituals of spring when the animals become twitterpated (not sure how to spell this. It comes from Bambi.




Live from an Empty Room

Acoustic Guitar/ Vocals: Freddy Bradburn

Electric Guitar, Electric Slide, : Steve Blanton
Baritone Guitar

Harmony Vocals: Lisa Stevens

All Songs Written by Freddy Bradburn
© 2006 FreddySongs

Recorded by Steve Blanton at Blantone Music

Engineered, Mixed and Mastered by Steve Blanton

Produced by Freddy Bradburn and Steve Blanton

Photography by Susan Bradburn

Graphic Design by Steve Blanton

Duplication by Steve Blanton


Thanks and Acknowledgments:

This was a three person operation. Steve Blanton, who lives a mile from me as the crow flies (literally), I did not really know before we began this project, but we quickly became friends and besides his recording skills I love the fact that I have his guitar playing on the disc. It gives many of the songs a nice rock n’ roll edge. I brought in my good friend and singing partner, Lisa Stevens. Lisa and I have been a duo for several years and have been friends several years a long time. All the songs were done with a minimum of takes, usually two. I wanted them to have a live feel and to feel a bit loopy. Like my life.

I want to thank my wife, Susan, and son, Orion and the rest of my family. Thanks to the many students at McDowell Technical Community College whose stories and lives weave in and out of these songs. Thanks also to The Wildacres Writing Workshop, Solatido Songwriting Workshop at Wildacres, Minnow Media, and Mike and the gang at the Crooked Door Coffeehouse. Special thanks to Steve Blanton for working on and becoming an important part of this project, and thanks to Lisa Stevens for her soulful harmonies.

Well, the birthday Festivus is over. Actually, it's been over for a few days now. It was such a whirlwind of non-activity that I can't remember hardly any of it and I wasn't even drunk. I do remember the sleep-over on Saturday. My 3 year-old grand-daughter came over and spent the night. We watched "Wallace and Gromit" (our favorite movie). We take turns being the Were-Rabbit. We played dress up. There are only a few people that I would let dress me in five necklaces and four clip- on earrings. I told her we hadn't had a cross dresser in the family since my grandmother had died.
I wrote a song about breast-feeding. Before you get the wrong idea, I have a new grand baby, so the subject of breast feeding was, well, in the air, on the tip of my tongue, so to speak. It made me think of the Louden Wainwright song, "Rufus is a Tit Man."
I asked Lilli, my grand-daughter, how she felt about having a little brother. She matter-of-factly stated, "He has a penis." This impressed me (not that he had a penis), but that she said the word. I was raised in a strict southern Baptist family in the late 50's early 60's where the very existence of the penis was denied, and you certainly couldn't use that word. I had to use the word weewee until I was 18. I wrote a song on this subject not long ago. In the late 50's and early 60's, it was not easy to find pictures of a sexual nature, especially in rural areas. Oh sure, there was the neighborhood dogs, and of course, the barnyard. But I always felt there was an awful lot of sex in the Bible. You know the sections. It read sort of like a generational orgy. Somebody begat someone, and so-and-so begat someone else, and then she begat he and he begat them, and them begat the Dolamites, and the Dolamites begat the Stalagtites, and before long you had Linville Caverns, and the those begat the these and the everybodys begat the nobodys and the nobodys begat, well, they didn't begat but they practiced a lot when they were alone. And all along our Sunday school teachers were preaching abstinence. Or at least that's what I was told. I wasn't actually listening to my Sunday school teachers, for one thing, they really weren't teachers and I was too busy mentally undressing Amy who was the cute girl sitting across from me in the Sunday School class. I mean between the horses and the Bible and the on- set of puberty, I didn't see a whole lot of abstinence going on. And it seemed to me the people preaching abstinence weren't getting any anyway, so they didn't want anyone else getting any either. I think that's what happened to Rush Limbaugh. Anyway, I'm not sure how I got off on that, but I'll rest now.
Oh, it was good to hear from my friend, David Bell, who sort of heckles me from my guest book. Sort of like the two old guys in the balcony on the Muppets. He obviously hasn't been doing his homework because you should never run out of Kinky Friedman quotes, Kinky doesn't. He also revealed my age, although, David you are mistaken. I've started counting backwards, so I just turned 52 and in two years I will hit the big 50. It's all just numbers isn't it. Well, I have to go now. The barnyard awaits.

Let the Festivus begin. Actually, tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. It is also my birthday. I've started the official celebration (yesterday), and it will continue through the weekend. Even though, there are no events planned I may think of some in the next few minutes. I will drink a Murphy's, Beamish, and a Guinness tonight, and perhaps tomorrow night. My annual James Joyce reading will drive everyone out of the house. I'll watch my Chieftains DVD. The parade down memory lane will begin after the three Stouts and when I lie (or lay) my head down to go to sleep. I will watch "The Secret of Roan Inish". I will look at my pictures of County Donegal and remember fondly how the sheep laughed at me as I walked home from the pub. And I will remember after the night in the pub of going to my language class the next morning (four hours after coming home from the pub) and not being able to form sentences in English much less in Gaelic. Slainte. That's Irish for cheers. It isn't pronounced how it looks. I found out that was the main rule in Irish Gaelic is nothing can be pronounced how it is spelled. You would be surprised how much you get to say cheers when you are in Ireland. I remember the first night in the pub and I was staying with a farm family up the hill (more like up the mountain) and a girl from Dublin named Sonya was staying in the same house. So Liam (about every other person is named Liam) gave us ride. I didn't really think about it at the time but he had been in the pub too. Anyway, he drove very fast on these roads that not even two unsheared sheep could pass each other on. Matter of fact, you know on cartoons when someone is going so fast it like tears the clothes off someone standing by the road. I swear he was going so fast he ripped the wool right off several sheep as we sped past. But it was a lovely time, lovely people, lovely conversation (when they spoke in English) and a dastardly language. But since I was born on St. Patrick's Day it makes me ceremoniously, officially Irish. I have a button on my gig bag that says "World's Tallest Leprechan", I like that. Well, that's part of what the parade is like down memory lane. Sometimes it can be a very long parade. Sometimes Santa is at the end of the parade, sometimes the devil. Sometimes I get them confused because they both wear red suits. But anymore they are kind of interchangeable because I ask them for about the same things, and neither one of them actually comes through very often anymore.
In the speech classes I teach, the students have to role play as tour directors who are preparing us (the class) to go a trip to a particular destination in the world, and they can't break character. Yesterday, one of the students referred to my absent-mindedness. This is a character I role play very well. I mean, I don't mind it. I think I have that reputation, but I do take issue with the term, "absent-minded." Most absent-minded people I know aren't "absent" at all. they are actually very present. They are so "present" they have so many things capturing their attention at any given moment they sometimes become momentarily overloaded. Now, the organized version of this is called multi-tasking which is a term I don't like. So what if several tasks become entangled with several daydreams, a hunch, an observation or two, a sudden insight, and a sudden urge to dance the Charleston. What is that called? Multi-intuiting, multi-inventing, adult ADHD. Some may call it absent-minded. So when all those things happen at once and short circuit each other. Remember you can still dance the Charleston without having to think. Pass the Ridlin (or however it is spelled). Slainte.

Freddy

I wrote a song this morning about lying, or is it be spelled lieing. How do you know if I'm talking about not telling the truth or just being in a prone position. What if I'm lying while I'm lying? How will you know which I did first? I think 51% of all lies are told while lying (or is it laying), and most of those while lying in bed, or laying in bed. I wrote a song a few months ago with that grammatical question of lay or lie in it, but I don't want to discuss that right now. Now I'm concentrating on lying or lying while lying. Anyway, it's a song that has a lot of truth in it. You notice there is no such confusion concerning the word truth. Mostly the truth is told while standing up, while the recipient of the truth is usually sitting down. This is to absorb the shock of hearing the truth. That's why when people are going to tell you something important they say, "Well, you better sit down." You know they are going to tell you the truth. At least, they think it's the truth. It's when they lie (or lay) down, that's when you have to watch them. It doesn't matter what position you are in when you read this. In mid-air is good though.

The Blog is back by popular demand. Actually my friend, Lorna did ask about it. She said it had left a void in her life. I asked her what kind of void. She said an empty void.
Actually, I decided to let my journal conform to the dates of the baseball season, and now it's time for spring training. I have to keep this short. No major insights or long stories. I don't want to workout too hard on the first day. A few anecdotes, some feeble humor, some puckish remarks will be enough. Maybe a little news. I'll start with a little news: I just became a grandfather again. My daughter just gave birth to her second, a little boy.

I went hiking yesterday on the Mountain-to-Sea trail and climbed to over 4000 feet (I started at Deer Lick Gap on the Parkway at 3400 feet), and I was in a t-shirt on March 10. I had a great view of Wildacres from high above it with all the leaves off the trees.

As I was finishing a run last week, as I was walking to my car, a man in a truck called my name. I walked over to the truck to see one of my old high school teachers. One of my favorites, he had taught Physics and Trig when I was a senior, but he talked to us about other things. World events and politics, Kent State happened when I was in his class. He made it feel like college. He treated us with an intelligent respect. It was funny. I had not really thought about him in years, but a day or two before I saw him, I had thought about him. Isn't it funny how that happens. You think about someone you haven't thought about in a long time and then suddenly you run into them. That is not always a good thing, but this was.
My birthday is in six days. On St. Patrick's Day. I will drink an extra Guinness or two and toast my good fortune.
On the music front, I'm doing a CD with a friend who lives and has a studio within a mile of my house. Lisa and I have a fair amount of gigs coming up, and I have written almost constantly since about September, but I've come to the conclusion this method doesn't produce anymore really good songs
than any other method I've tried, so I keep threatening to break out of this present routine for a different routine, but I haven't yet. And now here I am writing this letter to myself basically. I want to call it that. I don't like the word "blog" Actually, I guess this is an open letter. I like letters. I like mail. I like e-mails people send me. I check my e-mail way too much. So that's probably enough, I'm getting tired. What writing tip should I give myself. Well, the absence of this journal was a lapse. Lapses are good sometimes. What is a lapse in work, but a vacation. What is a lapse in being wakeful, but sleeping. What is a good time, but a lapse in judgment. What is a lapse in school, but recess. What does extra money in the strip club get you, but a lapse dance. That was the feeble humor part.

Merry Christmas. One of the good things about a long holiday is I forget what day it is. Monday can be Sunday (which it likes) Wednesday can be Friday, and Saturday can be Tuesday, although it considers it a demotion (the weekend days are a little snobby. I mean, I expect that from Sunday, but Saturday, come on). It helps the writing to lose track of time and days. I taped a segment off "60 Minutes" last night (ironically, a show whose title is called "60 Minutes").
But it was about the Molkiens (no not a Star Trek destination) but a nomadic sea tribe in the area of Burma, I believe. But they saved themselves from the Tsunami because they had a legend about a people swallowing wave. The first sign in the story is the sea recedes mysteriously a time before the big wave hits, so when they noticed the sea had receded prior to the Tsunami they all headed for higher ground and were saved. Now there's a valuable story. Anyway, they have no concept of time as we know it. No word for hello or good-bye, and no word for want (that may be taking it a little far).
On Christmas Day. I went to run at the high school which is about five minutes away from my house (the non-Molkien way to describe distance). It was a dreary day and was misting as I began my jog, but by midway through my run, the sun was beginning to shine and a rainbow appeared. A Christmas Day rainbow. It was a nice Christmas Day. My grand-daughter came over that morning dressed as Cinderella. She had a wand and turned me into a frog (not much of a stretch there). We played with the Sequoia tree puppet I had given her complete with bear, fox, squirrel, owl, bluebird and rabbit finger puppets. Later came the rainbow, and that night I watched the Bruce Springsteen from Storytellers where he performs and then talks so eloquently about his song process.
The day after Christmas (today) I wrote a song I liked, played tennis with my son, and watched some of "Waking Ned Devine." A good day so far.

I was going to do the 12 blogs of Christmas, and make it a cross between the "12 Days of Christmas" and "13 Ways to Look at a Blackbird." But that may be too hard for the day after Christmas. Maybe I'll just do some Christmas memories. Or take a nap.

I thought I would blog from my office space (glorified closet) since school is closing for the Christmas holidays this afternoon. And if there is one thing serious about my community college, it is closing. I couldn't get in if I wanted to next week. And sometimes I do dream of coming in during holidays and cleaning up my office (wishful thinking) or catching up (hopeless romantic) or even getting ahead (lunacy). But when the school is closed, it means it is closed.
Back to my office, it reminds me of my closet when I was a kid. My first creative writing urges came as a kid in that closet. Even before I knew the letters, I took a black crayon and on the closet door sqiwiggled a message that looked like letters. My mother, from the first, discouraged my creativity. She whipped me (I don't really remember the punishment, maybe she hung me up by my thumbs, let's say she did.) I remember I would sit in that closet. There was a light bulb with a string. There weren't many clothes hanging around that I remember. There were shelves with games and some toys. Just like now at work, except there are a lot more books now and fewer toys, but I do have some stick horses and some pig noses and masks, and a little figure of Tinker Bell, and a bloody mannequin head (this would have freaked me out as a kid). I guess I had a penchant (in this the right word) for solitude, even then. In the early years, I shared a room with my brother who was six years older than me. We shared a room until he went away to college. This must have been tough on him. But I liked our closet. Some kids got locked in their closet as punishment, but I went there willingly. We had twin beds. My brother went off to college when I was in the sixth grade. He graduated high school in 1964. His record collection had an impact on me. He had early folk records like the Kingston Trio, but he had a lot of Frank Sinatra records. I liked Frank Sinatra. By 6th grade I was a hopeless romantic ("Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered Am I") I'm still pretty bewildered. My brother had a desk. I found his Playboy magazines there. Boy, did that have an impact. I had a transistor radio. I would listen to Dodger games when they were in St. Louis or Pittsburg, and to the top ten on WKYC in Cleveland when the Beatles dominated the charts. Sometimes I would take the radio to bed with me and listen under the covers and dream of things far off and a future that was yet far away, and now here I am in my life realized or (unrealized I'm not sure which), in a space not unlike the closet where I first dreamed of things, in my future that has shrank considerably. A future where the past becomes material for stories and songs and examples and lessons. Where it all becomes so inextricably interwoven maybe my future is my past. Hmm, so I guess the writing tip for today is somewhere in there. In the closet, on the radio dial, in the glossy pictorial of the coeds of 1964, in the arm of Sany Koufax vs Bob Gibson, in George Harrison singing "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby", but probably in the closet. Look in your own closets. Probably lots of writing material there. Well, it's very quiet here. Most everyone is gone now. I think I'll go to. Maybe, I'll write a song about my closet tomorrow. I didn't know I was going to write about it here. There's a tip as well. Start a thread and follow it. I knew I was going to write from my office today and that I had referred to my office as a closet in an earlier blog. That's all I knew. That'a all I needed to know, and now I have written it and it feels good. It felt good to remember things I didn't know I was going to remember, and feelings I didn't know the memories were going to evoke. To put it in the words of one of my favorite songwriters, Warren Zevon, the feeling of "Splendid Isolation."
From the closets of cyberspace, good bye and good luck.

We tend to remember how nice a Christmas tree is and forget the little annoyances like when you buy the tree and get it home and off the roof of your car and someone says, "okay where is the Christmas tree stand"?, and you say, "It should be..." Generally, when you start out any statement with "It should be. . ." , it turns out to be bad because things are almost never where they should be. This was the case this year. The Christmas tree was not in the three or four places it should have been, and it wasn't in the fifteen or sixteen places it could have been. My wife suggested it might still be on last year's tree lying somewhere in the pasture. I scoffed at such a notion but privately went to look at the edge of the pasture placing it in the realm of one of those places it could be. I didn't see it. I suggested maybe we could just lean it against the wall this year. Next, I tried what most Christmas decorating males would do. I went back and looked over the same places for the fifth time especially those places that took me away from everyone else. Finally, as I stood at the kitchen window and began to wonder how much tree stands cost I thought I spotted an oval green object down in the briars and honeysuckle of the hedgerow. Could it be? Could I have been so callous to have left the tree stand on last years tree out all year? Could I? I had a reputation for leaving tools out like hoes, rakes, clippers, mowers; but the Christmas tree stand? I was just inviting a visit from the "ghost of Home Depot Christmas." I did remember last year after Christmas a mighty wind came up and caused the Christmas tree and stand to roll down the hill behind our house and into the hedge row. I thought perhaps now I could sneak down and get it off of last years tree and then tell everyone I found it in one of those places it should be and that I forgot that is where it should be, but I got caught and it gave everyone a great laugh and I'm sure will come up numerous times. Oh well.
And to add insult to injury, or I suppose it should be injury to insult, I broke my thumbnail tightening the screws while putting up the new Christmas tree. Breaking a nail may seem minor, unless of course you play fingerstyle guitar and you have a gig that very night, which I did. I had to buy some fake nails at the store and glue a fake thumbnail on to what remained of my thumbnail. This actually works very well, although it does give me the appearance of a girly man since it's glued on. I'm wearing it right now. I have a sudden urge to paint it.
The gig Saturday was fun and easy at the Crooked Door which is in our town. It was typical of a folk acoustic gig. We had an appreciative audience of about 14 or 15 people, and we made $37 a piece, so after I bought a sandwich and a four pack of Guinness, I had $19 left. but that's not a complaint really, we had a great time.

Oh what is the songwriting tip today, or writing tip. Well let's stay with the first major tip: Make writing a habit, and under that I talked about developing it into a routine that makes it an integral part of your life. Then what do you write about, so maybe that's the daily tip. I don't really pre-plan what I'm going to write about. I just sit down. I begin to noodle on the guitar and then I let my mind drift and settle on things I've seen, or heard, or thought about, and then see where it leads. Sometimes it's a phrase that comes up that is evocative, sometimes it's a person or story I've encountered, sometimes a conversation I've had, sometimes it's an object immediately in front of me. It's a very freewriting kind of mind set that I like to use. I mean, it inexhaustible. You never run out of things to write about. I certainly hammer the same themes; love, growing older, the passage of time, the contradictions and the paradoxes, but I don't really think about those things when I begin to write. Start out with the real stuff: the stories, the people, the objects, they'll lead you to what they're trying to say. And when you get tired, you quit. Done.

The 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death. I could write for a few days on the impact of Lennon and the Beatles on my life. I saw a picture of the Beatles for the first time when I was eleven, so I guess I was in the 5th grade. It was in the Weekly Reader (remember the Weekly Reader. It was kind of a cheesy newspaper you got in school with important articles, and of course, questions you had to answer about the Iron Curtain and the Panama Canal ands stuff like that.) I remember being jealous because the girls were all gaga for the lads. But the I bought the 45 (remember those little records with the big hole in the center) of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There" and drove everyone in the house crazy because I would play one side and then immediately turn it over and play the other side and on and on for hours. I remember going to Asheville and my parents bought me a Fender Newporter acoustic guitar (my first), and with it I bought Ed Sales "Learn to Play Guitar in Seven Days." It was not long after that I vowed to kill Ed Sales for false advertising and later discovered he meant not seven days but seven years. Then I started buying the albums in Roses in downtown Marion at the back of the store in the little record rack. "Meet the Beatles" "The Beatles Second Album" "Something New" "Beatles '65.
Sometimes I reminisce in class. Sometimes I punish them by showing the Ed Sullivan show DVD (it's the entire show). Right now in my Communications class I have the daughter of my first girlfriend (the danger of living in the same place all your life). Maybe that's why I wrote a song this morning about growing old and the invisible thread that joins us all together, or maybe it's not invisible, maybe it doesn't exist; but indulge me, let's say it does. I think another incident invoked the song. In one of the last assignments I give to my Communications class, I ask them to interview someone in the profession they're pursuing about the role communication plays. One student (a young man) was presenting his interview with an instructor. He asked him why he was teaching the subject now instead of being in the profession anymore. The instructor replied that he had had his time and now it was time to teach others and besides now he was an old man. Then the student looked up from his presentation and pointed out that the instructor was in his 50's. I started to chime in and say, hey, wait a minute, I'm in my 50's (early 50's) and I'm certainly no old man. But I didn't. I let it slide. But it registered, and when that happens it sometimes becomes a song, which it did.
So I guess it's time for the songwriting tip, or maybe since the last one was about writing daily, maybe I should talk about how to do that, or how I do it.
Develop a routine. Make it a part of your life like eating, or brushing your teeth, or drinking straight out of the milk carton (shame on you). I always write early in the morning when I can set aside two to three hours. I make coffee and take a drink of orange juice straight out of the carton. I sit in a small cluttered room (I'm not in the basement anymore) and look out a large picture window. This room used to be part of my mother's living room, but that's a different story. The session is very much like meditation or yoga in a way. I really can't see myself not doing it. It's a great way to start the day. I always expect to come out of the session with something (besides a headache), so I do. If nothing else it becomes a journal entry for that day (only in song form), a marker, a foot print (size 9) that gives some sort of indication that this day was.
Where was I, the mail person interrupted me, although I'm no Coleridge and this is no Kubla Khan. I should end with where I was when I heard the news of Lennon's death. Ironically, I was in school again. This time I was teaching. I remember playing "In My Life" and other Beatles song, and my students not understanding my sadness. Isn't that much of John's legacy. That most of our life is spent "not understanding."

Chelsea and I had a very nice gig for the Fiddle and Bow Society at the Garage in Winston-Salem. Chelsea is only 14 but she is such a pro already. She sailed through both sets. My cousins came from Greensboro which was a nice surprise. Randy and Vivian Fulk came. Randy is a fine singer/songwriter I met at Wildacres and besides that he owns a wine vineyard. So we had a lot of friends in the audience. The venue gets its name honestly. It reminded me of, well, a garage. I think a lot of rock and punk bands play there, in fact, someone was playing after us at ten.

I've decided to give this blog some direction (unlike the rest of my life). I figure if I give some sort of songwriting or writing tip in each entry then after awhile I'll have enough for a book on the creative process that might be entertaining and useful, but if I think of it as writing a book I won't get any where, which is a tip in itself I suppose. I mean, I have to get lost in the act of writing, absorbed by the moment. If I think too much about the overall goal too close to the beginning, then I won't do it. But my first songwriting tip would be the lesson I learned from poet, William Stafford. I may have already talked about this, but who remembers. But he said he wrote a poem every day even if he had to lower his standards. So for the past few years any time I've had a writing session, I've come out with a song. Sometimes, maybe, most times, I had to lower my standards, but it created an expectation, a goal, that I think helped me a lot. So my first tip would be is you have to write. You have to figure out by writing what it is you want to write. You have to figure out by writing what it is you don't want to write. The books, the workshops, the groups, all those things help most if you're actually writing, if you're actually lost in the maze of trying to find your own voice, your own craft. It's like going through a maze where you're trying to avoid the exits. I think I'm lost deeper and farther than I've ever been, and I'm okay with that. The only thing I care about is the next dead end, the next avenue, the next endless circle, the next connector, the next bend, and to me that's a good thing. It's both the starting point and the ending point. All those practical things you will learn about song craft, and song pitching, and booking, and performing, and music business, only matters in the context of the quality of your craft.

Whew, that was pretty deep. Where did that come from? Well, the gig Saturday night was for a group of Methodist ministers and their wives, maybe that was the preachy part, and right across the highway from the restaurant where we played is a cornfield. The owners made part of the cornfield a maze. The Corn Maze. Sounds like a bad horror movie, and, in fact; at Halloween it was advertised as the Haunted Maze or is that Maize. Anyway, perhaps the metaphor of the maze came from it, even though I use that metaphor a lot, well, because I am lost a good part of the time.
Just adjacant to the cornfield was once a drive-in movie theater. . . but those are stories for another day.

I better blog today because the weekend looks rather busy. I have two gigs this weekend. One, a rather (that's two rathers in the same paragraph) important gig for the Fiddle and Bow Society in Winston-Salem. The Fiddle and Bow is a distinguished organization, or do I go for the hat-trick and say a rather distinguished organization, but the venue is called the Garage. That makes me more comfortable; even though, I never played much in my garage, and now I don't even have a garage; but I did, in my early years of playing the guitar practice a lot in my basement. I would sit underneath the naked light bulb and the pull string, a round table, a cement floor, a banished kitchen chair, an old oil furnace behind me that would suddenly come on and scare the bejesus out of me, The washing machine beside me and curious jumping spiders listening in the shadows. Ah, the good old days. I was in my twenties (hard to imagine) I was in transition, having dropped out of college, my father had died and I was working and living at home with my mother, and had decided to work hard at learning to play the guitar. My mother was not exactly thrilled by this, and it just confirmed what she already knew. That I was a bum. The community was not really supportive of my decision either (not that I cared since I had already decide to become a recluse, as well.) Rumor had it that my mother locked me down the basement and I was living down there where she would from time to time throw me raw meat. And late at night I roamed the neighborhood peeking into windows and eating live squirrels. This is a lie. I would never eat a live squirrel. Hey, I sound like Boo Radley, or rather like Boo Radley. Anyway, this gig is with Chelsea. Saturday, I play at a private party with Lisa. I think the party is a group of Methodist ministers at a little Italian restaurant (Little Siena) about a mile from my house. At least they're not Baptist ministers. Playing for the clergy eliminates about half of my songs. Roughly half of my songs are about spiritual things and about half are about bodily things and another half are a combination (I was always rather bad at Math), and like Woody Allen said, "Let's hope I get the half that eats." But it should be fun and rather relaxed and I'll get to play the mandolin a good bit which pleases me.
My project has been mainly on hold this week because of the gigs and such, but I'm aiming for an informal performance on December 13, so next week will be devoted to it. I did write a song on my 12-string this morning about the crying statue of the Virgin Mary. I watch the news too much, but sometimes it does trigger a song. It seems the Virgin is up to her old tricks again of teasing people. Somewhere in California (of course) an alabaster statue of the virgin has mysterious tear trails coming from her eyes and people are starting to come to see the so-called miracle, mainly because they watch too much news too. But I did write a rather humorous song about the hopeful and the skeptical, the reverent and crass, all mixed in together.

Songwriter's Tip:
When writing a topical song don't preach in it. No one wants to be preached to. Make the scene and images do the talking for you. I find topical songs really hard to write well, and seldom intentionally go there.

I think I'm rather done for now.

Gosh, a whole week went by. Of course, it was Thanksgiving which doesn't really happen in real time.

Songwriting Tip: If you can't go to a workshop create your own.

The bad thing about workshops is that they end. You go to these 3, 4, 7 day workshops. You meet all these great people. You get really fired up, and then you come back to the real world where you find your hot water heater has gone out, the car insurance is due, and you have bed bugs; even though the bed bugs are your fault because you brought them back with from the workshop. (Bedbugs are making a comeback). Also it would be a good name for a band "The Bedbugs." The "Bedbugs" bite. But I don't have a band. I have several female singers who would probably object to the name, and it doesn't work as a solo name. "The Bedbug" no matter how much it might actually apply. Oh, where was I before I got off on bedbugs.
Oh yeah, workshops. Start your own writing group. You can meet once or twice a month with other people and try out your songs; or whatever, it is a good way to get feedback and motivation to write. Generally, it's easy to do. You may have a friend, or someone you know who would be interested, or you could put out a flyer or call an organizational meeting, and they will come. Believe me writers are a little like, well, bedbugs. You may not see them but they're out there. Some of them are really out there, so some type of screening process is advised. But generally, you can meet, set up the times and the ground rules as how things will be presented, stuff like that, and so you can keep the momentum of a workshop going. It doesn't have to be all songwriters, or poets, or whatever you're doing. I like the idea of opening up to diverse disciplines. I told my communications class yesterday that you could learn something in your area no matter what the workshop. I could learn something about songwriting by going to a watercolor class, or a novel writing class, or a pottery class, or a quilting class; okay, maybe not a quilting class, but certainly a beer making class. The beer making class always reminds me that there are some things more important than songwriting.
I'm not in a writing group right now, maybe I should try to start one. Anyone interested. I do have the Crooked Door Coffee House where we started a music venue and I give guitar lessons and songwriting lessons there. It's a great place with great people (it's on the second floor of what used to be an old hotel.) If I start a writing group we would meet there. I was going to write about the Thanksgiving Boonie concert there last Tuesday which in many ways typifies the spirit of the place but instead I have written mainly about bedbugs.

Songwriting tips:

1. Go to workshops. Any kind of workshop.
2. Never throw anything you've written away.

Workshops. If you're aware, you can always pick up something of value at a workshop. I decided to do a creative project along with my Storytelling classes at the college, using the same assignment and the same timeline in an effort to break out of old writing habits. Their assignment was to create a group of stories or poems (15 typed pages worth) and somehow tie the stories together. So I decided to take a theme from the magnetic poems they had done. I chose "I Pick Life" and decided to look over the songs I'd written in the last year and try to find a group of characters in my songs that I could tie together. What does this have to do with workshops? Well, I think after you attend so many (as I have), you can get a little jaded and think you've heard it all. I was a teaching a class at Duke University Writer's Workshop in May and someone in the class told me they had gotten a lot out of the class because I did the writing exercises with them. I remembered this and realized I wasn't doing this as much as I could in my college classes. oh I freewrite with them and participate during many of the activities I do, but nothing on this scale. So I took my ipod which had all my song drafts since July and listened to the songs I'd written in September, well, I had to start somewhere. Now I have listed 20 or so songs that have potential while trying to write some new ones around this project. Hence another workshop revelation. At Solatido (a songwriter's workshop at Wildacres in Oct.) Kate Campbell gave a one day workshop. I had taken a week long workshop with Kate at the Swannanoa Gathering (a workshop held in July at Warren Wilson College) several years ago. It was a great workshop and I love and greatly admire Kate as a songwriter. I was anxious to see her but I didn't know what I might learn from a one day workshop which, of course, is when you're likely to learn the most important things. But she talked about how she didn't always have every song written when she started recording a project. That she followed a certain theme or thread and often songs came within that process instead of just having a bunch of songs and saying, well, now I have a bunch of songs, so I'll make a recording which is exactly what I was doing. And the more I thought about this the more I wanted to try it, so that's what I'm doing.
So I picked some character songs from songs I wasn't playing that were still in the notebook. There is a comic book writer, a deaf girl, a person who works in a department store, a mannequin, a statue, people in a funeral home, an overweight girl, all characters who pick life over the alternative (whatever that means). I knew then I had to place them in a small town where their paths could cross in songs (sort of the "Spoon River " thing). I knew then I had to have a song that somehow introduced them all, but could still stand alone as a song. Hence another workshop maxim: break up your routine from time to time. This is a hard one for me. For the last 3 to 4 years I've written incessantly, but always rather aimlessly, depending on what that day brought with no real goal since the final goal is a recording which is a tough one because of the expense. I bought an ipod at the beginning of this year and yesterday I looked at some statistics. In September I wrote 16 drafts of songs, in August I wrote 16 drafts of songs, in July 17, and I can guess the numbers are similiar in other months. I was so locked into this routine. So because of this project
I went in the other day and wrote specifically to creating a song about this town and these characters and I thought there should be some instrumental themes running through it sort of like a musical. I decided it should be in open C tuning, then I remembered I had written a song about a small town in open C several years ago that I liked but had never made it out of the notebook. I went back to that notebook and found it and it became the chorus for this new song. Hence tip #2, which is also a workshop maxim, "Never throw anything you write away." Sunday I wrote another song to this project based on an old song I had that I had tried several times to bring out of the notebook.
Well, see if I can take this project the distance, I mean, I suppose I'm writing this more for me than anyone else. Other than my good friend David Bell, probably no one else is reading this blog. But it had changed my routine, and I hope to follow the more theme oriented direction for awhile. More about workshops next time.

I blogged yesterday, but I forgot to save it and lost it. But it went something like this:

Weird gig category: Tina got us a gig at Cannon Hospital in Linville. Tina is one of the women I play for and who sings my songs. Chelsea (the 14 year old) is another, and Lisa, the mid-wife is the other. I'm a guitar slut, what can I say? Anyway, the gig was at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. Tina explained that the hospital had music in the lobby at various times, sort of an atmosphere thing. Well, I liked the concept.
We set up in the lobby which was a big open, high ceiling area that reminded me more of a lodge than a hospital. It was a small hospital, two buildings, two floors, on the top of a big hill off to itself. When we started there was no one around so we just sat up in the lobby (we didn't need a p.a. or anything) facing this beautiful rocked wall up to the second floor, so our music could drift through a major portion of the building.
We were into our second song when this couple came in. They were middle aged, a mountain couple, and they sat down in the chair directly across from us. The woman started crying. I mean, it is a hospital so I figured she either was visiting someone or was sick herself. The song Tina was singing was one of mine called, "Expect Nothing Less From Love" which is serious but hopeful. We had discussed our set list and decided it would be good to take out any really depressing songs, or songs about dying. I also stated we probably shouldn't do "The Tooth Fairy Got Shot." Anyway, near the end of the song the woman stood up and came and stood near us. After a moment she raised her hand slightly as if she wanted to say something. When we ended the song, she asked us if we could play "Amazing Grace" and we did. A nurse came along to guide the woman and the man off to a see a doctor, I assumed. Before she left, the woman took a couple of crumbled dollars out and gave them to Tina. Of course, we didn't take them, but it was just so sweet. Just one of those unexpected moments. We played for about an hour, uneventfully, but the acoustics were great and we enjoyed it. People drifted through, some acknowledged us, some lingered, some didn't. It was like being a street performer in a sacred place. It reminded me of standing in Westminster Abbey, in poet's corner, and standing on or near (I can't remember exactly) the names of Byron and Shelley. Wonderful poets who were heretics really.
Anyway, my songs felt at home there. They tried on hospital gowns, visited a few patients, talked to the nurses, had green jello in the cafeteria, talked to the nurses, drifted down hallways, rode on a gurney, talked to the nurses, came back to the lobby, washed their hands incessantly, said good-bye to the nurses, complained of light-headedness, jumped in my guitar case.

A nice moment. I think the one good thing of getting older is recognizing those moments, savoring them, holding on to them, and then letting them go before you strangle them. That's a big step. It took me a long time just to recognize them. Playing music really helps. Finding those moments that are just transcendent. Because you recognize how ephemeral they are. Then that helps the writing because you try to take those moments and then recreate them. A distillation of reality, or some little truth distilled into a song. A pleasant alchemy.
Sunday I wrote two songs. The first one was about being unstuck in time through the help of aliens based loosely on Kurt Vonnegut's novel, "Slaughterhouse Five," although I'm not sure why I was thinking about that book, but it was an important book for me when I was in college. I kind of liked the song, although it might be as bad as it sounds. But typically, it was the second song that attracted me the most, a happy little number about the blurring of holidays. How our lives are steered toward these breaks in our day to day lives. I mean, when you working full time you're always saying, ah, only three weeks to Thanksgiving and then, there's Christmas and the long stretch to Easter, and then the 4th. Think if we didn't have those holidays.
Anyway, it's Tuesday afternoon, I wrote a song this morning before my lesson with Ruth. I can't remember what it's about though. That's not a good sign. I was thinking about the project I'm doing with my students, where I try to break out of some of my writing routines. One is to write some little short songs. Break out of the three minute and thirty second mode I seem to be in. We'll see. More later.

It is Tuesday noonish. Windy, leaves blowing everywhere. They are piled up outside the door. It almost feels like November, so of course, as I was writing this morning the images outside my window made it into the song. But I have an assignment. I decided to do a project with my storytelling students. A project pretty much from scratch and then share it with the class as we go along.
I begin this section with writing prompts and exercises to loosen them up and much of the emphasis is to think and try to see things differently than normal. I feel I need a bit of change myself so I thought I would try this. I started by taking their magnetic word poems and writing a song called "I Choose Life." This was one of the lines from a student poem and then I just randomly flipped their papers and chose lines I was attracted to that somehow seemed to tell a bit of a story in a very impressionistic way. Of course, there were great lines I couldn't use like, "the friendly fish and brilliant sausage," and "A girl saw Elvis. He was ugly from the head, and his butt was on fire," and "Dirty naked men hit on you," I just couldn't fit those in. Maybe later.
I told them about what I did Tuesday night in class but I think they were too worried about starting their own projects to be impressed that I would dive off the deep end with them. And then when I ran yesterday, I listened on my iPod to the songs I'd written in September. I just chose September because I have emphasized the importance of the random, of playing, of trusting serendipity in the early stages. Because of how much I write and how little I edit, I couldn't remember the songs I'd written until I heard them, and I was just listening to see if a song took me in any direction since my assignment to my students is that their stories, or whatever, have to tie together in some way. Anyway, I wrote two songs on September 22. One was loosely based on a Billy Collins poem about writing, and I thought this might be a direction. Start at the naked heart of writing and work outward from there. But I'm not sure yet, I'm going to let what happens in our discussions in class determine it. We'll see, I'm out here on this one, but I think working like this with some definite focus and deadline will help me. You know, it seems funny to mention focus and deadline. Here's a project: I don't know what I'm doing yet. I'm depending on the totally random (if anything is totally random). And then I end by talking about focus. But I suppose the total lack of focus depends on focus, right. Purposeful unfocusedness is hard work. Hard to say to.

You would thing that blogging an hour a day wouldn't be so hard, but apparently it is. I guess writing two hours or so daily, trying to jog every day, working full time teaching, and drinking at least two Guinness a day doesn't leave much time for anything else.

I'm in my office at school which is a small cramped space--a glorified closet really. It's made smaller because of all the stuff I have crammed in here. I try to remember all the college professors I had and their offices. Their offices were always bigger, but most were always cluttered by books and more books. Mine is similar to those. There are books everywhere and if someone comes in for a conference one of us has to stand outside because there's not room for two people. I remember all my college professors had beards, even the women, which was strange. I not only have books but stacks of paper, but I also have stick horses, a head with a bloody mouth (remember I do teach a theater class), a wolf's head mask, also sheep and duck masks, a small plastic Tinker Bell, a guitar, magnetic words in a tin can, a red formal dress, a tiara, a large pair of lady bug wings, a large wooden sun with smiling red lips on my wall, plus an "Amelie" poster, as well as a "Wallace and Gromit" poster. I could go on but you get the picture. Students like my office, if only there was room for them to come in. Sometimes they stand out side and observe me. Perhaps they want to ride my stick horse. I discover my office is very much like my writing space at home, very cluttered, hopelessly cluttered, magnificently cluttered. I've thought about buying a goat.
My storytelling classes are starting their own creative projects so we are doing activities to spark their creativity. It perplexes some. We are having a magnetic poetry contest, maybe I'll post the finalist on this blog and have my readers vote. Of course, I may have to rent some readers for this task. Also we're doing some free writing from the chapter called "Poetry as No Big Deal" from Peter Elbow's book, "Writing with Power." I wrote a song this morning (just an exercise really) by taking lines and phrases from my students magnetic word poems and just going with them.
Tina and I practiced at school yesterday. Tina is in Health Information Technology and since it is Health Information Technology Awareness Week (no joke) she had to stay at the table they had set up, so we had to practice in the school commons. Common is a good word for this place for there are some common people who inhabit it. Our location was a few yards from the snack bar, a few paces from the ping pong table, behind us was the pool table. And unlike Ireland where people tend to acknowledge and appreciate music, in the rural south among rural young people you are considered to either be invisible or have some odd disease that would make you want to play and sing, but Tina and I are pretty good so we practiced just fine. It just makes the existential nature of this more palpable. Anyway, Tina and I play in the lobby of Linville Hospital Saturday morning where they regularly have music, so if any of you are in the area and you get really sick come on over. I suppose you could come even if you weren't deathly ill. Then Saturday night Chelsea and I play the Crooked Door. Busy, busy.

Jeez, it's already Thursday. I wrote a song on Tuesday and then another one this morning. Both were quick rather painless deliveries and unlike the Rumplestiltskin-ish, wrinkled, ugly baby songs that usually come out, these were rather cute. I liked them.
Generally, I have to hunker down into writing a couple of weeks before I hit, what I call, a little hot streak. It means two weeks of songs that are usually just throw-aways but I can't think in those terms. I have to think that without the bad ones the good ones don't appear. It's a lot like sports. I played a lot of sports in my younger days, and I put in all the work and serious (and not so serious) practice. I would be plugging along when suddenly I'd hit a streak where I could do no wrong. And the worst thing I could do was think about it, or try to analyze it. But the hardest thing not to do is to think about it, and analyze because you think if you can just figure it out you can stay hot forever. So you over think it and just as magically as it came, it just as mysteriously disappears, and you go into a slump. Nothing you do is right and the worst thing you can do is to think about it or analyze it but you think if you can just figure out what it is you're doing wrong, but you just make it worse, and just as mysteriously as it came, it mysteriously disappears. But the constant is, you keep plugging away. You keep practicing and working and not thinking about how terrible or great you are.

Writing songs is a lot like that. I hunker in my bunker plugging along, sometimes thinking about the existential nature of it all. Then suddenly a song appears that surprises me. Then the next day another song appears and maybe for about a week I'm on this roll and then suddenly it's gone. I'm back to plugging away, waiting for the next flurry, always trusting it will come. It's like the muse with your sleeves rolled up. She just doesn't come because you've lit candles and laid out your pencils. She comes because you've sculpted her, and created her out of the materials in your lab. Hell, she's like the bride of Frankenstein (without the big hair) I prefer her without the big hair. So she comes to you all sexy (from the dead bodies used to make her) and all electrified and charged up from the voltage, and she comes up behind you and puts her electric fence hands over your eyes and says, "Guess who"? And your pencil to the paper grounds you and if you let it up you'll be fried, but you can't see because she has her hands over your eyes but she cracks them just enough to let you see the paper and the secrets of the universe and holy moly you're writing in the white heat of the muse you created and continue to create and then she looks at you and then disappears right when you need her the most and. . . what the hell am I talking about. . .

The blog is now a week old, and I am a week older. Thanks to Richard Tuttle, friend and songwriter,who responded to the blog via the guestbook. Again, I encourage anyone to respond who feels compelled because I would like to make this blog a place for other writers to contribute and discuss the creative process.
Richard asked me how I balance writing daily with the need to practice and work on songs for performance. The truth is I don't balance it very well at all. The mornings I write are almost always about writing something new. That two or three hour window is about creating, and then I try to work in afternoon or evening time for practice, editing or recording. It is a weakness I have. It takes a fairly long time for me to work new songs into my set. Generally, I depend on a song to rise up out of the process. I think I recognize those that are good enough to work in right away. Those that stay with me, or I like right away; but I have many, many songs that I think are potentially good that I just don't go back to. Because Ihave a day job teaching and I only do two or three gigs a month I tend not to be pressed when it comes to working in new material. Sometimes I know that having a deadline is a really good thing. The same is true of recording. I have an mBox that I like a lot that I use in conjunction with my lap top but I find myself not recording very often. I know I need to impose some deadlines on myself to keep from languishing, and drowning in all my new material.

My good friends and excellent songwriters Greg Trafidlo and Mike Pearral came down to play the Crooked Door on saturday. It was daylight savings night so I drank the same beer twice as they came over to the house afterwards. These are friends who I met right when I began to write songs seriously. It always makes me sad such friends do not live closer and makes me see the weaknesses of isolation.

I wrote two songs on Sunday and again it was the second that came out of the first that appealed to me. I was using the partial capo on the second fret (the quasi-DADGAD) configuration. Also played tennis (for too long). Was very tired and stiff afterward. Played with my granddaughter, Lilli. So it was a very social weekend for me.