Ok so, part of the blogging goal was to try and keep track of the songs I’ve been working on. I did a couple of songwriting blogs in early December, you can find them by following these links or just scrolling back if you fancy it……
My first songwriting blog was called "No-One's There" and has a little bit about my songwriting process, and some lyrics I'd just written.
I also wrote a blog on originality, plagiarism and influence, looking at last year's legal battle between Ed Sheeran and the estate of Marvin Gaye. I'd written a song called 'Good Heart' at the time which was reminiscent of a Black Keys track, and was thinking about how acceptable I found to it to knowingly use an existing song as your influence.
Back to the present...
I am now consulting the big black writing book, which is my first stop when I’m sitting on the floor with my back to the radiator, to see if anything worthy of writing down is going to pop out. Writing is nearly always a “morning thing”. I find the warmth and the quiet gurgling from the heating pipes quite soothing, and I generally haven’t been encumbered or distracted by anything else.
The tally since early December though is down a bit. Six ideas with enough form to be actually called songs (i.e. lyrics, melody and chords), but one of those is a Christmas song that arrived eleven days too late to be of any immediate use, and one is the union of two ideas I had months ago that I’ve suddenly pieced together. As a tally that’s about one a week, BUT I have been trying to have some time off over Christmas, so perhaps it’s not too bad. A lot of other stuff has been going on too, but I think I’d try and choose to write at least a little every day where I can. Like learning an instrument or reading a book, some tasks aren’t best done in one sitting, no matter how warm and comforting the radiator is.
So for my own interest maybe, the five songs “showing promise” (but perhaps not Don Felder / Hotel California level promise) are “Lowest Of The Low”, “Hold Onto The Sides”, “No Reminders”, “In Those Trees” and “Fox In The Hen House”. It’ll be interesting to see if any of those make it as far as an open mic performance in the next few months.
Songwriting podcast recommendation...
If you’ve written anything this month you want to share, please send me a link! Otherwise if you’re interested in songwriting and like podcasts - I’d recommend sodajerker.com - the site has over 250 interviews with some of the greatest songwriters of our time!
What's that guitar?
Guitar Spotters : the guitar in the picture is a Japanese Kimbara 8/Y dreadnought. I paid about £5.00 for it in a job lot of guitar gear many years ago. They were made to look like a Martin….they don’t sound like it ;-) but it is weirdly a good guitar for writing on!
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