Experimental songwriting part 2
In the previous video I took a snippet of instrumental and built it into a groove to use as the backing for a song. In this one I start building it into a song.
songwriting
Experimental songwriting pt 1
Background It’s been a long time since I’ve written a song by the ‘traditional’ method of sitting with a guitar and making something up from chords, then adding words. Not that I don’t like that method, but now I prefer doing that with someone rather than alone. On songwriting workshops I’ve done that usually leads … Read more
Miller’s Lake
Here’s a new song. This one started life as a poem, some time before COVID. I had a daily practice of writing a couple of pages before breakfast, most of it rubbish, of course. One morning this just wrote itself; I was quite astonished. A year or so later I asked Gerry Callaghan if he … Read more
The Glasgow Songwriters
This is a followup to my post on the Edinburgh Songwriters Showcase. My friend Tom Warrington wrote with his reminiscences of a similar venture in Glasgow: I really enjoyed your email a few weeks ago flagging up the post on the Edinburgh Songwriters Showcase. You’re very possibly aware that something vaguely similar took root in … Read more
Crying In The Street by Hungry Ghosts (and others)
Here’s another from the Hungry Ghosts reunion at the Village in January. This is one of my more popular songs over a long period. Hungry Ghosts used to perform it but it was never recorded. I did my own version on Romantic Fiction but this live rendition beats that hollow. Crying in the Street I … Read more
Who Was The Poor Girl from Dublin?
This is the story of a collaborative songwriting effort over the last six months or so between Gerry Callaghan and myself. The result was a three-song album -an EP if you will – which we’re selling to benefit SAMH, the Scottish Association for Mental Health. Four Little Leaves – the beginning Early in 2018 I … Read more