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
“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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
As a largely unknown songwriter, who has yet to have a mainstream (or even cult) hit here in the USA — I make this geographical caveat only due to some minor international success, including a local radio hit in Norway and a top 5 radio and video hit in Mongolia, back in 2003 and 2004, … Read more
Back in Spring of 2011 I joined the TAXI independent A&R service in what I might best describe as a last ditch effort to try and get my songs into some paying opportunities. I’d been trying to make a living as a songwriter for over a decade, I’d been divorced for a bit over a … Read more