story
Story Behind the EP: That Time of Year Rewrapped
Way back in 2006, my second release as a self-produced recording artist was a four-song EP of original songs called That Time of Year. If you’re interested in the story behind that EP, you can read all about it in a November 2006 blog entry (originally published on Myspace!). I’ve always felt the songs on … Read more
Story Behind the Song: “Ghosts”
I was ghosted, by someone I’d been very close to, back in late 2018. I won’t go into the details of that story here — I’ve already told parts of it in past blogs including “Story Behind the Song: Wishing You Well” and “Story Behind the Album: The Road That I Must Take”. “Ghosts” isn’t … Read more
Story Behind the Song: “Stubborn Heart”
“Stubborn Heart” is a song about the conflict between the head and the heart. You know how it goes: The head tries to reason with the heart in matters of crushes, infatuation, love, passion, and various other thinking/feeling conflicts. The heart doesn’t want to hear logic, though. It’s into feelings, even at the risk of … Read more
Story Behind the Song: “Wishing You Well”
“Wishing You Well”, a song I wrote back in 2007 and recently included on my The Road That I Must Take album, came about as the result of a songwriting challenge. On June 18, 2007, the local Orange County chapter of Just Plain Folks picked two possible song titles, “Wishing You Well” and “The Last … Read more
Story Behind the Song: “Sweet, Sweet Color of Love”
On the last day of November 2011, TAXI, an organization that bills itself as helping “independent Songwriters, Artists, and Composers get their music to Record Labels, Film & TV Music Supervisors, Music Libraries, Music Publishers, Music Licensing Companies, Ad Agencies, and Video Game Companies”, published a listing that started out, “NY Ad Agency URGENTLY needs … Read more
Story Behind the Song: “Seasons”
It was November 11, 1997 when a songwriter from the UK name Derry Jones posted a critique request on a country songwriting mailing list named Orbison (so named after iconic singer Roy Orbison) that started, “I don’t usually do this, but I feel this song/lyric deserves a second look!” The lyric was called “Seasons”, and … Read more
Story Behind the Song: “Undertow”
The story behind my latest single, “Undertow”, starts back in early November of 2003. I’d emailed a relatively new co-writer, Mary Lou Sudkamp, about some potential opportunities with our first co-write, “I Didn’t Think”. She attached a new lyric, “Undertow”, to her reply, asking about my interest in writing music to it. I was pretty … Read more
Story Behind the Song: “I Don’t Pray Anymore”
My latest single, as of this writing (early May 2017), is a song I wrote over thirty years ago, in early 1987. That was before I was writing lyrics on the computer, and before I started keeping extensive notes of lyric drafts in progress, so it would be tough to recreate the history of the … Read more
Coincidences
Have you ever had an experience where you were working on something at a particular time, partly due to a series of coincidences that “just happened” to make something convenient at that time, where that thing you were working on ended up feeling “just right” for that moment? I had one a couple of weekends … Read more