High Holy Mass of Contradictions

(I can’t believe it’s been THAT long since I updated here.)

It was a crazy productive weekend, and to reward myself for my diligence yesterday, I spent all evening writing lyrics. By hand. On paper. With a pen!

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

By somewhat popular request (OK: two people), I’m capturing the Twitter song here in my songwriting blog.

I’ve been trying to do better about keeping the content of this blog related to Honey Bowtie Music, meaning Karsten’s and my writing, our pitching & publishing, and our life at our home office & studio, so I wasn’t planning on doing any kind of post PubCon follow-up here, but hey! this is relevant to songwriting. It’s some of the only writing I did while I was in Las Vegas, so it counts.

The story is: on Wednesday afternoon, I was taking a break in my hotel room, watching the #pubcon search feed in Tweetdeck burn up while everyone chatted about the “5 bloggers and a microphone” session, when I noticed that Kate Morris tweeted:

#pubcon someone needs to write a country song about losing love for twitter!

Fearing that there might not be too many other songwriters in the PubCon crowd, I felt it my duty to respond to the call.

@katemorris Just for you: “A hundred forty letters / And spaces in between / Isn’t near enough room / To say what you really mean” #pubcon

@katemorris 2nd verse: “It’s getting kind of silly / How everyone I meet / Instead of asking if I blog / Now asks me if I tweet” #pubcon

@katemorris I’ll let the rest be crowdsourced. It’s more the Nashville songwriting style to collaborate anyway. #pubcon

Only the rest never ended up crowdsourced, since everyone was caught up in what was going on the session. I mean, how wrong is that? Paying attention to the panelists instead of Twitter?

So if you attended PubCon and you end up here after searching for blog posts about it, here’s your chance: take a swing at writing additional verses in the comments. This is not limited to PubCon attendees either. My Nashville buddies, long-time net-friends, and songwriting colleagues are all encouraged to play along. I’ll update the post with the song’s progression, and it will be ready for performance by March in Austin.

Everyone who comments with additional verses gets songwriting credit. As we say in Nashvegas, “add a word, get a third.”

So who’s up for some cowriting?

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

It could just be the DayQuil talking, but I think I’m going to undertake NaSoWriMo (as in, 30 songs in 30 days) AND, uh, let’s call it NaBooWriMo (as in, attempt to finish a first draft of a book) at the same time this year. After all, I like to have multiple things going on at once, and this will certainly accomplish that.

If it IS just the DayQuil talking, I reserve the right to pretend like I never said this. So what if it’s on my blog?

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

Some time ago, I wrote that I was abandoning the leading software for songwriting: MasterWriter. I proposed a few alternatives, but in reality, those have turned out to be disappointing for the purpose, as well.

I’m just wondering what I’m overlooking. Yesterday I found Minim, which looked promising, but after downloading it and working with it I don’t think it’s right either.

I can’t imagine I’m the only one out there who’s frustrated. What are the rest of you doing for songwriting tools?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I briefly skipped across something in a feed a few days back referring to this, but I didn’t realize what song the campaign was using, which means I didn’t realize the songwriter in question is none other than my neighbor, Gretchen Peters.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Once again, nice flag-waving title, and the chorus generally sounds pretty upbeat:

Let freedom ring
Let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know that today is the day of a reckoning
Let the weak be strong
Let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away
Let the guilty pay
It’s Independence Day

That penultimate line is the giveaway. The song, written by Nashville veteran Gretchen Peters, tells the story of the mother of an 8-year-old daughter who escapes an abusive husband by torching their house, with him still inside.

“The fact that the McCain/Palin campaign is using a song about an abused woman as a rallying cry for their vice presidential candidate, a woman who would ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, is beyond irony,” Peters said. “They are co-opting the song, completely overlooking the context and message, and using it to promote a candidate who would set women’s rights back decades.”

[…]

Now Peters says she’ll be donating her songwriting royalties from the song to Planned Parenthood — in Palin’s name. “I hope with the additional income provided by the McCain/Palin campaign, Planned Parenthood will be able to help many more women in need,” Peters said.

It’s certainly not the first time politicians have used a song for a campaign without paying attention to its underlying message, but it’s arguably one of the more bewildering usages.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

The publisher of “Mango Sun” emailed us this morning to let us know he has “major” interest in the song.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Monday is the anniversary of my dad’s death, again. It was a reflective time for me last year and it’s looking like it will be the same this year.

I can tell because last night we went to see Josh Ritter (whom Jae has been talking about for years but I’m just catching up). There was a song he played with lyrics that said “tell me I got here at the right time” and it was bittersweet and melancholy and painted a picture of loving someone through illness, and it got me thinking about the process of caring for my dad while he was sick and the acceptance I had to come to about the possibility that in one of my trips back to Nashville, I would not be there when he died. And that’s basically how it worked out in the end — Karsten and I had just made it back to Chicago that evening and decided not to go by my parents’ house until the next morning since it was already pretty late. And my dad died that night.

Sometimes the loss hurts more because I know I could have seen him alive one more time, but more often I know I was there at the right times all the previous times.

Anyway, it’s funny how once you’re reminded of something difficult, you can see connections in the loosest ways. So all through the rest of Josh Ritter’s set, I was primed to reflect on all kinds of loss, but especially my dad. And then he played “Kathleen,” which is one of the few songs of his I knew before last night, and I like it but it’s a tough one for me, because it so heavily references the Irish standard “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and that’s one of the songs my dad used to sing when he was a nightclub performer and is the source of my name. Of course, Ritter’s song goes off in a different direction, but I think if you carry the connection over and think about his song in the context of its heritage, it makes his song even more intriguing. The Irish song is a plea to that song’s Kathleen to hold out hope in the narrator, to recognize that he sees she is unhappy and that he can once again bring her the happiness that she has lost. The Ritter song is a plea to its Kathleen to place some hope in the narrator, to recognize that he appreciates her and can see her clearly and can make her happy even if it’s just for one night. Each song is a kind of begging, but from nearly opposite ends of the lifecycle of a relationship — and, you could even say, nearly opposite ends of life itself.

Anyway, I thought about that while he was playing the song, but I was also just washed away in grief every time I heard the line “I’ll be the one to drive you home, Kathleen.”

And yet I walked away from the show feeling hopeful, and creatively inspired. I think there’s another post about that I need to write, because there are other factors at work there, but I definitely took away ideas from listening to Ritter’s brutal and beautiful honesty, and I intend to use them.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

Just sang on a scratch demo we need to send off to an artist we’re writing for. Gawd, I hate doing that. My voice sounds like gravelly crap. Gravelly crap with a clothespin clipped onto my nose.

I was going to do it yesterday, but after a weekend full of drinking and hanging out in smoky places, there was no way I was getting more than a two-note range out of my voice.

Anyway, it’s done, and it gets the idea of the song across, so who cares about anything else, right?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I’m so lame. I never got around to posting on Blog Action Day. But my excuse is that I’ve had a real roller coaster of a week. I went from, well, managing myself on Monday to having two direct reports on Wednesday, and that’s only part of it. So yeah, I really do think activism is important, I just didn’t take the arbitrarily designated day to talk about it. I wish I could link to my activism category, but I’ve been slow with this whole content import and re-tagging thing, so I’ve only gotten around to tagging one of my old posts with it. Oh well. There’s always next year.

***

On Thursday evening, Karsten and I went to hear Peter Plagens give an art lecture at the Frist with our friends Brad and Jed, and I’m pretty sure we were all creatively inspired. It was awesome. He basically talked about the struggle to embrace the new once you’ve become comfortable and familiar with the not-so-new, but unlike that rather trite-sounding summary, he was articulate and witty and insightful.

***

Speaking of embracing the new, I spent this morning working on updating the top-level honeybowtie.com site. I needed to replace a lot of the clunky tables, image-based text styling, and Dreamweaver-generated Javascript from oh-so-long-ago with a more adaptable CSS-based design. I’m not in love with how it looks yet, but it’s definitely a step in the direction I’m trying to go. The idea is to incorporate the blog and the rest of the site a bit more seamlessly, but I’m obviously not there yet.

***

Karsten is spending the day working (and I’m occasionally collaborating with him) on a project we’ve been trying to get around to finishing for several months now. Between all the chaos of the house renovation, my day job, our flea and rat troubles, sick cats, and vacation, it’s been delayed a bit. So with any luck we’ll have a scratch demo recorded by tomorrow night, even if it’s only a chorus. The artist we’re communicating with about this song has been waiting long enough and we need to get this one wrapped. I’m also trying to round up some other song ideas she might be interested in, so I guess we have next weekend already planned, too.

***

This vodka and tonic is simply perfect. I am a bartending genius, I tell you.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I just had to renew Honey Bowtie’s subscription to Billboard and I did it, of course, on Magazines.com. But that’s a $299 order (side note: yes, Billboard is a ridiculously expensive magazine, but it’s such a great way to follow a broad cross-section of the industry), and because I’m running several tests on the site that I don’t want to skew with such a huge order, I had to very carefully step around all the spots on the site that would have tracked me and added my purchase to test results.

I am such a geek.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Last week, a song opportunity came up (I'll say more about it when/if there's more to say), and it required digging through our catalog for songs of a particular style and mood. I thought I'd done a relatively decent job of setting MasterWriter up to be able to do this, but in this case when I attempted to find suitable songs, I found myself at a loss as to how to whittle down my 600+ song library in an efficient way.

See, MasterWriter is antiquated by software standards (the copyright in the web site's footer says 2001, and yet the FAQ page still says "Coming Soon!"), and its search capabilities still require the user to select a field in which to search. Ugh. More to the point, not all fields are searchable. So where I've set up a rough approximation of keywords (such as male, female, or neutral, loss, breakup, happy, etc), I now realize that I have no search capability.

But I knew this, sort of. I had recognized a while back that there was every possibility that MasterWriter would never produce another software release (even though I provided them with feedback so specific it was practically a requirements document, which no one at MasterWriter ever acknowledged to me, so I shortened it and posted it as a review on Amazon, thinking maybe someone would get ambitious and use that feedback to build a better tool). At that point I started investigating other possibilities, such as Journler or Yojimbo. But now I see that I need to speed that process up and get everything moved over from MasterWriter to another app with a quickness so I don't run into more situations like this.

But MasterWriter has no real export facility. So it seems to come down to a manual, one-by-one copy and paste process. No kidding. I'm not thrilled.

The ugly: we spent the entire weekend obsessing over fleas. In 8.67 years of living with multiple cats, they have never had fleas. Admittedly, our cats have been outside (on leashes) more lately than ever but I also think the flea population must be larger this year, probably due to the heat.

Anyway, we'd "treated" the cats with some over-the-counter Hartz crap a few weeks ago, but it obviously didn't do a thing. Meanwhile, the problem was getting worse. I've been busy with work so I couldn't do much about it myself and had been trying to be patient since I knew Karsten was already dealing with the rat problem in our back yard and I didn't want to overwhelm him. Besides, he seemed confident that the Hartz stuff would work and that the fleas were minimal anyway. On the contrary, it seemed to me that if you spot one, you can assume there are dozens/hundreds/howeverthehellmany you can't see. I regularly noticed fleas on the cats, so I printed out web pages with tips on killing fleas and left them on his keyboard. I suggested he just call an exterminator and get it over with but when he did, he only asked about the rats. He just didn't seem to feel as much urgency as I did about having to coexist with the fleas. It was all starting to freak me out a little. Last week, when I stood in the cat room and could see the fleas jumping around, I had a major meltdown. Karsten felt bad for not realizing how upset I'd been getting about it, but I assured him that everything would be fine it we could just rid the house of fleas. So he picked up the Advantage flea treatment from the vet on Friday and we started treating the cats first thing Saturday morning.

Each cat had to be isolated so they wouldn't lick the stuff off of each other, which meant that we could only treat three cats at a time: two of them were stuck in cages while a third got to be loose, but stuck inside a closed-off room. Meanwhile, we vacuumed the house, sprinkled boric acid powder on all the carpets and fabric surfaces and used a broom to push it down into the fibers, and washed the curtains and bedclothes in the hottest water and dried them in the hottest drier they could withstand.

By mid-day Saturday, there were dead and dying fleas all over the house. So I went around and vacuumed everything again yesterday, but they're still dropping off. It's gross, but it means the treatment is working, so I'll take it.

The bad: it was miserably hot outside. I mean it. Hot. It was 104 yesterday. It makes me feel like I'm melting. And since we wanted to escape the house once we got through each day's flea treatment, we were limited in our options.

Though actually, that didn't go too badly: we ended up going to see a movie ("Becoming Jane"; it was OK), eating out for every meal (all the food was great), thrift shopping (I found some cute stuff), and hanging out with some songwriting friends who were visiting from Chicago (which was fun).

So I guess the bad was really just that every time we stepped outside, we felt like we were about to melt into flesh puddles.

The good: even in my jangled state of mind, I wrote a few songs. Hanging around songwriters last night got me all fired up. When we got home, I dashed off two songs in fifteen minutes along with a few other ideas I'll come back to eventually. One of the reasons I was so inspired was that, although the songs our friends were playing last night were written well and were enjoyable, they were so consistently about relationships ending badly that I felt double-dog-dared to write a heartfelt song that wasn't about that. So I did.

I need to remember that not only is a good workout healthy and stress-relieving, but it also always seems to leave me chock-full of good song ideas. Awesome.

Courtesy of Digg, I present to you the top 10 worst lyrics ever, as rated by BBC 6 Music.

U2, Toto, Duran Duran, and Oasis all made the list.

But are there worse examples? I can't think of any offhand that are truly awful, but one springs to mind because of how much it missed the mark. In Dwight Yoakam's "Ain't That Lonely Yet" he sings:

Once there was this spider in my bed
Got caught up in her web
Of love and lies
Spun her chains around my heart and soul...

Aah! It bugs me every damn time I hear it. Spun her chains? Since when do spiders spin chains? I mean, he could have gone for the extra internal rhyme with "bed/web" and done "Spun her threads around..." or even gone suggestive and used "Wrapped her legs around..." or probably dozens of other possibilities, but "chains"? Bad. So bad.

What lyrics bug you?

I've been chastised by multiple people in multiple circles within the past week for not posting enough. I think about it a lot, but I never seem to make the time. Part of it is I feel like I'm scrambling to keep up with my work responsibilities, and part of it, if I'm honest, is a increased feeling of restriction on my posting since I started this job. Not that anyone has given me reason to think I need to do that... well, other than letting me know that people at work know about this journal/blog. But whatever. I know I have options. I could always use friends-only posts, but at this point a good deal of my friends and readers are outside of LiveJournal and I don't want to ignore them. I could adopt a different persona, set up a different blog, and talk freely about whatever I want, but I've always enjoyed being myself online. I could talk about things in a veiled way, but there are always those who know what's being described and who's who and all that. I could just throw caution to the wind and write whatever I want, but I'm not sure I'm up for that.

But I think the latter is closest to what I'm going to have to do. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, by way of update:

• I've been at the "new" job almost 3 months now and it's very cool but very demanding.


• I haven't really had time to think about songwriting since I started here, but I'm still holding out hope that that'll change.


• The staircase and front porch have been gone for several weeks now but we still don't have a new staircase yet, which looks really funny.


• My mom got elected to office at the local level last week. She's now a politician. That's weird.


• I was part of an amazing gathering of women bloggers over the weekend, and was very humbled to have been invited.

And by way of apologizing for my lack of recent activity, I give you a picture of a robin.



There. Isn't that better?

2007 should be a year for advances in our songwriting business and on the house renovation front. That's a lot to ask for, perhaps, but I think it's reasonable.

( The down-in-the-dirt details, and the rest of the resolutions )

And right now, I resolve to stop editing this entry and get on with other things. Happy New Year, everybody!

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a great article on how to organize your iTunes library, just in time for their readers' New Year's Resolutions. It's a wonderful set of suggestions, but I'm not seeing how they'll work for me.

Most people who use iTunes have probably put some effort into organizing their iTunes Library. What makes me different, perhaps, are a few characteristics: I'm using iTunes to organize not only multiple users (Karsten and myself) and multiple media (music, movies, etc) just like everyone else, but I'm also using it to organize both business and pleasure. I acquire a lot of music that isn't for my listening pleasure; it's for songwriting research. Believe me, I'm not a big fan of certain war-mongering politically-über-conservative country artists I could name, but I have copies of most of their CDs anyway. It's important to me to be familiar with what's getting sales and radio play, even as Karsten and I strive to bring our own style to pop country songwriting. Anyway, all that means that I have a huge passive library of music on my external hard drive.

So here's what I do.

( Manage that metadata! )

( Rate it! )

( Back it up! )

So what are your methods? What do you do to make sure your music collection (whether in iTunes or not) is organized the way you need it and backed up properly?

Before I even begin, I'll give him this: I think the organ part in "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is fantastic -- key to the success of the song, no doubt. Key to the emotional weight and message of the song. But is it songwriting? Does the organist deserve to be credited on the copyright?

A judge in London today said yes, as the court awarded a 40% share on the song's royalties (dating from May 2006 on) to former Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher.

The judge said the song's organ solo "is a distinctive and significant contribution to the overall composition and quite obviously the product of skill and labor on the part of the person who created it."

Yeah, no doubt. Bully for him. But the tricky thing about this ruling is that it leaves the doors open for musicians who are not a song's writers to claim that their performance on a song's recording is substantial to the success of the song and deserves to be part of the copyright.

In case you're not familiar, here's the scoop. Songwriters don't write pop songs the way classical composers typically wrote symphonies, where every part was composed down to the last sixteenth note. Nowadays, the lyrics, the vocal melody, the underlying chord progression, and usually a characteristic riff or two (such as a "turnaround" to move between song sections) are all that most writers produce. Depending on the genre, you can either add or remove an element or two from that list. But it'd be rare in any contemporary genre to enter the studio with parts fully composed from start to finish -- other than the vocals, and even there some embellishment is expected most of the time. That's what session musicians do; they take what's written and further interpret the song on their instruments -- and all without co-writing credit.

In this case, a very strong case can be -- and obviously was -- made that the organ part on "Whiter Shade" is critical to the composition of the song. But what performances merit that assessment and which ones are just musicians clocking in and doing their jobs? It's a weird slippery slope.

On one hand, I know that a lot of session players are grossly underpaid for the staggering skill they bring to the recording process. If you want to see an example, check out Standing In The Shadows Of Motown. Along with Berry Gordy, Jr.,  Holland-Dozier-Holland, and the other songwriters and producers behind the scenes, the Funk Brothers were so much of the sound of Motown, and they made chump change for pay.

While situations like that clearly need to improve, I stand with the NSAI motto here: it all begins with a song. If it weren't for the song's writers, no one would be making any money on the song. They're the originators of the idea; they're the creative force that sets the process in motion; at the risk of sounding biased, I think they deserve significant incentive to continue to create.

So while they come off a bit alarmist, I mostly agree with Brooker and Reid's quote at the end of the article: it is a dangerous precedent, from the perspective of protecting a songwriter's livelihood.

From Brad on 2:

Country trio BlackHawk (Goodbye Says It All) will make a $15,000 donation next week to the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in memory of their former member and co-founder, Van Stephenson, who died in 2001 from skin cancer.


The group set up a memorial fund in Van's name when he passed away. The $15,000 will be used for melanoma research.

The two other guys, Henry Paul and Dave Robbins, have taken on a new member, Anthony Craword, and they've now got a deal with newly-formed Rust Records.

[Sorry for the space-wasting picture layout, but for whatever reason, image alignment breaks in this template and I don't know why.]

First of all, I love this news. For obvious personal reasons, it touches me to see the $15K being donated and earmarked for melanoma research.

Secondly, the fact that they've regrouped and have a new deal inspired me to write a song. But it was taken from one of the 13 songs I already drafted this month, so my NaSoWriMo count didn't increase. Oh well.

Thirdly, and I truly don't mean to sound in any way disrespectful, but didn't Van Stephenson (at least in that picture) look a lot like (a younger) Timothy Busfield (with a mullet)?

It's the last day of November, in case you hadn't noticed, and that means all November writing projects are pretty much at their end. In my case, that signals the end of my 30-songs-in-30-days "NaSoWriMo" challenge, which I have once again failed to complete. But I don't really care. All I'm really shooting for when I set about to do these things is to make myself write fast and get some ideas down, and I did do that.

I managed to draft 13 songs. I can't say I really finished even one. But that's OK. Because this was also a crazy-ass month. At work, we had a major scramble with a deadline of 11/30 (yep, that, too, is today!), and my weekly average number of hours shot way up. I've also been sick twice this month, including right now, which is why I'm not expecting to be able to churn out any more than I already have before tomorrow. And my current tummy troubles have me in a really bad mood and I'm finding it hard to concentrate on anything. So yeah, not the best conditions for creative writing.

So it's over, and the count is 13 songs in 30 days, sort of. There might even be a few ideas worth going back and polishing up, which is a bonus because I was really just thinking of this as an exercise. Maybe I'll try the challenge again in a few months when it's not looking to be a crazy month at the day job and I've loaded up on multivitamins and echinacea.

In the meantime, the month of December is usually a wash for songwriting. Too many weekend activities, too much commotion, not even time to sit idly with my laptop, my guitar, and a cup of coffee and mull over an idea until I find just the right thing to say. So this is probably pretty much it until January. But I'm pretty satisfied with where things stand, so I'll be happy to take a break and then get back into it come the new year.

Hope everyone else who participated in a writing challenge this month got something good out of it!