There's a tempo they want. A sound quality they want. There are subjects they won't air. The music industry (like any other successful industry) is about formulas and rules. Follow them, and you will succeed in it as a songwriter and, for better or worse, likely remain a part of it for life. Incidentally, the formula looks like this: This Brightness plus that Tempo plus this …
Tag: horse
alibi
I have wanted to write about the people who owned our old farmhouse before, but I couldn’t realize the song, which more and more seemed to want to talk about some essence of their moving on, not their past. Reaching into the past, I am able to salvage: The dim farmhouse, morning radio on … Black-blue meadow …
approximately forever
An approximately three-minute song is as fleeting as a galloping horse against infinite time. But it can capture forever a moment that’s gone forever.
voice lesson
Songwriters worry a lot about finding their voice. We all find our voice, though. By the time you’re ten or more years into your craft, you find it. But that’s not the trouble. The trouble is getting rid of it. Of course the song idea in my head has been done before. The question I have to answer is, "have …
the last holdout
You left to run horses / We both had reasons to run / I hear only hooves now / No rider comes / Oh, runaway heart / Again, I've lost you / There you are, gone, the last holdout / And I'm holding on to things gone missing / Lover, you left so much words and music …
finder’s reward
When I'm making up a song, I keep an ear to the ground for what people cast off. An overheard remark in a train station, the half-sentences of friends workshopping love’s particulars in the local coffee shop: They’re the finder’s reward. I listen in like an ecclesiastic to the human heart as it bares its splendor and its brokenness. I listen, and write. And as I write, I …
beautiful flaws
I am so flawed as an artist. My songs are imperfectly performed. My wispy voice is sometimes shaky about pitch. My recordings are a set of first-takes, a thoroughly homemade affair. Nothing feels mastered. Listen closely, and you might hear barn swallows, the sound of wood scraping on a floor, probably a chair. I don’t have many true fans. Is …
days
There are days when everything is gut, and the song I’m making up seems to know exactly where it wants to go. On those days, the heart begs the mind to stay away.
unrepeatable, beautiful
This morning, I sit in my little studio and write with a view of the birch-lined road and the light let loose in the garden. I’ll work until 4:00 or 4:30, then pick up the children at the bus stop, and finally … head back home. We fled to this faraway town a few years ago and never looked back. Some people here know …
missing, and meaning
When someone is missing, their possessions start to take on meaning. Where I run into these things – a lover's shirt, her hairbrush, the empty dresser – I begin to make up songs. In a way, a song is just a long, loving look at whatever remains. Outside the song, does an outside exist? The world and everything in …
