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
I’d chosen the week of September 10, 2001 to be a solid week of songwriting. I got off to a respectable start that Monday, repurposing a melody I’d had left over from an abandoned musical theatre project by writing new lyrics and adding a musical bridge. The result was a Christmas song, “Santa’s Best”, which … Read more
The large majority — I’d guess 75% or more — of my songs are written starting from the lyrics, whether I write those myself or get a lyric from a collaborator. “It Might Be Memphis”, which I’ve come to call my “wishful thinking” song (a more positive spin on it might be to call it … Read more
The year was 1982, and I was attending graduate school at USC in Los Angeles, California. I’d been attending the Newman Center (a small Roman Catholic church geared toward college students) near the USC campus and was planning to attend a Christmas party there. I don’t recall much about the party, but I do remember … Read more
Somewhere around thirty-four years ago, back in 1981, I was attending college in the small town of Potsdam, New York at what was then called Clarkson College of Technology (now Clarkson University). I’d become very interested in a young woman I’d met via the college’s theatre club, and I’d thought we had a plan to … Read more
This month I thought I’d introduce a second track planned for my forthcoming pop-flavored album (working title In and Out of Love Again) and tell the story of how this particular song came into being. The song’s title is “Just a Little Kiss”, and I’ll let you have a listen before getting to the story: … Read more