Today the sun almost shines in the palest sky. I’m trying to get into the day and finish up the second song for a new EP. I have to. It’s a pretty song, but not easy. The song would say, "You’re not easy, too." We’re trying one another’s patience. And I need to be braver than …
Tag: songwriting
dream job
Sometimes I wish I had become a newspaper delivery boy. Or a milkman. Or a bridge toll-taker … do people still do that for a living? I love the routine of those jobs. Or maybe, the clown wielding the wide broom who follows the elephants in the circus. Or a carpenter … yes, a singing carpenter who dresses the plank in the …
strange and familiar
There’s something deeply satisfying about writing songs without being hemmed in by expectations of a specific linear form or any particular idiom of music. Yet it isn’t as simple as “out with the old, in with the new.” Here lies the beauty, complexity and excitement of songwriting: Making up something that bears identifiable traces of its roots yet stays unmistakably my own … writing a song that …
go
Love goes on / It's the lovers who go words and music by Tony Starling Kidd © Buffalo Spoon Records
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 …
ache, and art
One of the remarkable things about being a musician is that there are no rules. There’s no right way or wrong way to be one. You can experiment with every aspect of making up a song, and there’s no one way to listen to it. But I do follow one rule: to honor the difference …
opening sounds
What something sounds like can’t change what it is: The sound of a drawer opening … The north wind on the telephone lines … A motorbike along the lane … Lilacs crashing through old barn walls … The key turning in the door to an empty house … Footsteps retreating. Yet sound opens sound. It …
