Monday, August 31, 2015




The Songwriters 
Willie Nelson
We get to break out of prison
Make love to our best friends wife
Have a beer for breakfast in Boston
Drink rum in Jamaica that night

We get to tell all our secrets
In a code no one understands
We get to shoot all the bad guys
But never get blood on our hands

We're hero's, we're schemers, 
We're drunks and we're dreamers
We're lovers and sometimes we're fighters
We're students We're teachers 
We're the devil We're preachers
We're true love but mostly one nighters
We're the songwriters

Half the world thinks we're crazy
The other half wants to be us
And the're jealous because we get to hang out
In the back of some big stars tour bus

We're old boots and tee shirts and blue jeans
We're cables and strings and E Chords
We only dress up in November
When they hand out some writers awards

We're hero's, we're schemers, 
We're drunks and we're dreamers
We're lovers and sometimes we're fighters
We're the truths We're the lies 
We're stupid we're wise
We're true love but mostly one nighters
We're the songwriters

We ride bridges we cross em and burn em
Teach lessons but don't bother to learn em

Our mama's don't know what we're doing
Why we stay out all night long
I told mine I was a drug dealer
She said thank god you ain't writin songs

We're heros, we're schemers, 
We're drunks and we're dreamers
We're lovers and sometimes we're fighters
We're the truths We're the lies 
We're stupid we're wise
We're true love but mostly one nighters
We're the songwriters

We're the songwriters





Sunday, August 30, 2015


Five years ago today.

Marty and me singing Wasn't Born To Follow.

Album cut..........

Yeah, I'm playing mandolin.

I sound great

because of my two additional mandolin pickers.

Who were miked.......

Band mates include Kate and Dan.

Chris Hillman sitting front row right.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

A classic from 1967.



What's the Story, Mr. Blue
Joni Mitchell

What's the story, Mr. Blue
Did she pull the rug from under you
Did she chop your dreams up two by two
And kick them out the door
I could sympathize you, son
But pity words stick to my tongue
And sorry words have all been sung
So many times before

Oh, Mr. Blue, you blew your chances long ago
Oh, Mr. Blue, you're through
Quit acting like you didn't know

Hang on one more day or two
Then I promise I'll be laying you
Odds that she's found someone new
While you stand around and rust
She don't need no part-time man
With no part-time answer understand
She don't want an hour's fall of sand
For a lifetime full of dust

Oh, Mr. Blue, you blew your chances long ago
Oh, Mr. Blue, you're through
Quit acting like you didn't know

Mr. Blue, you missed the shot
Didn't turn out quite the way you thought
It would, I'll bet, cause you got caught
Out playing Donald Juan
She's got polish, she's got class
And someday when on the street you pass her house
You'll wonder why the grass
Looks greener on her lawn

Oh, Mr. Blue, you blew your chances long ago
Oh, Mr. Blue, you're through
Quit acting like it isn't so


Give it a listen-




Friday, August 28, 2015


Stumbled across a neat article written by Mr. Hughes in 1956.




Jazz as Communication
Langston Hughes

You can start anywhere—Jazz as Communication—since it’s a circle, and you yourself are the dot in the middle. You, me. For example, I’ll start with the Blues. I’m not a Southerner. I never worked on a levee. I hardly ever saw a cotton field except from the highway. But women behave the same on Park Avenue as they do on a levee: when you’ve got hold of one part of them the other part escapes you. That’s the Blues!

Life is as hard on Broadway as it is in Blues-originating-land. The Brill Building Blues is just as hungry as the Mississippi Levee Blues. One communicates to the other, brother! Somebody is going to rise up and tell me that nothing that comes out of Tin Pan Alley is jazz. I disagree. Commercial, yes. But so was Storeyville, so was Basin Street. What do you think Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were playing for?(1) Peanuts? No, money, even in Dixieland. They were communicating for money. For fun, too—because they had fun. But the money helped the fun along.

Now; To skip a half century, somebody is going to rise up and tell me Rock and Roll isn’t jazz. First, two or three years ago, there were all these songs about too young to know—but. . . . The songs are right. You’re never too young to know how bad it is to love and not have love come back to you. That’s as basic as the Blues. And that’s what Rock and Roll is—teenage Heartbreak Hotel—the old songs reduced to the lowest common denominator. The music goes way back to Blind Lemon and Leadbelly—Georgia Tom merging into the Gospel Songs—­Ma Rainey, and the most primitive of the Blues.(2) It borrows their gut-bucket heartache. It goes back to the jubilees and stepped-up Spiri­tuals—Sister Tharpe—and borrows their I’m-gonna-be-happy-anyhow-in-spite-of-this-world kind of hope. It goes back further and borrows the steady beat of the drums of Congo Square—that going-on beat­—and the Marching Bands’ loud and blatant yes!! Rock and Roll puts them all together and makes a music so basic it’s like the meat cleaver the butcher uses—before the cook uses the knife—before you use the sterling silver at the table on the meat that by then has been rolled up into a commercial filet mignon.

A few more years and Rock and Roll will no doubt be washed back half forgotten into the sea of jazz. Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat. And Louis must be getting old if he thinks J. J. and Kai—and even Elvis—didn’t come out of the same sea he came out of, too. Some water has chlorine in it and some doesn’t. There’re all kinds of water. There’s salt water and Saratoga water and Vichy water, Quinine water and Pluto water—and Newport rain. And it’s all water. Throw it all in the sea, and the sea’ll keep on rolling along toward shore and crashing and booming back into itself again. The sun pulls the moon. The moon pulls the sea. They also pull jazz and me. Beyond Kai to Count to Lonnie to Texas Red, beyond June to Sarah to Billy to Bessie to Ma Rainey. And the Most is the It—the all of it.(3)

Jazz seeps into words—spelled out words. Nelson Algren is influenced by jazz. Ralph Ellison is, too. Sartre, too. Jacques PrĂ©vert. Most of the best writers today are. Look at the end of the Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Me as the public, my dot in the middle—it was fifty years ago, the first time I heard the Blues on Independence Avenue in Kansas City. Then State Street in Chicago. Then Harlem in the twenties with J. P. and J. C. Johnson and Fats and Willie the Lion and Nappy playing piano—with the Blues running all up and down the keyboard through the ragtime and the jazz.(4) House rent party cards. I wrote The Weary Blues:


Downing a drowsy syncopated tune . . . . . . etc. . . . .

Shuffle Along was running then—the Sissle and Blake tunes. A little later Runnin’ Wild and the Charleston and Fletcher and Duke and Cab. Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Ella. Tiny Parham in Chicago. And at the end of the Depression times, what I heard at Minton’s. A young music—coming out of young people. Billy—the male and female of them—both the Eckstein and the Holiday—and Dizzy and Tad and the Monk.(5) Some of it came out in poems of mine in Montage of a Dream Deferred later. Jazz again putting itself into words.

But I wasn’t the only one putting jazz into words. Better poets of the heart of jazz beat me to it. W. C. Handy a long time before. Benton Overstreet. Mule Bradford. Then Buddy DeSilva on the pop level. Ira Gershwin. By and by Dorothy Baker in the novel—to name only the most obvious—the ones with labels. I mean the ones you can spell out easy with a-b-c’s—the word mongers—outside the music. But always the ones of the music were the best—Charlie Christian, for example, Bix, Louis, Joe Sullivan, Count.(6)

Now, to wind it all up, with you in the middle—jazz is only what you yourself get out of it. Louis’s famous quote—or misquote probably­—“Lady, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.” Well, I wouldn’t be so positive. The lady just might know—without being able to let loose the cry—to follow through—to light up before the fuse blows out. To me jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream—yet to come—and always yet—to become ultimately and finally true. Maybe in the next seminar—for Saturday—Nat Hentoff and Billy Strayhorn and Tony Scott and the others on that panel will tell us about it—when they take up “The Future of Jazz.” The Bird was looking for that future like mad. The Newborns, Chico, Dave, Gulda, Milt, Charlie Mingus.(7) That future is what you call pregnant. Potential papas and mamas of tomor­row’s jazz are all known. But THE papa and THE mama—maybe both—are anonymous. But the child will communicate. Jazz is a heartbeat—­its heartbeat is yours. You will tell me about its perspectives when you get ready.



NOTES

(1) Tony Jackson (1876-1921), American ragtime pianist and blues singer; Ferdinand Joseph “Jelly Roll” Morton (1885-1941) began playing piano in New Orleans’ Storyville at the age of seventeen and was regarded by many as the first great jazz composer; Joseph “King” Oliver (1885-1938), popular ragtime performer with roots in New Orleans.

(2) Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929), early American pioneer of the blues; Thomas “Georgia Tom” Dorsey (1899-1993), African American blues singer, gospel songwriter, and pianist.

(3) James Louis “J. J.” Johnson (1924- ), an American trombonist and composer, and Kai Winding (1922-1983), a Danish American trombonist, formed the popular group Jay and Kai in 1954; Lonnie Johnson (1889-1970), American guitarist and jazz singer.

(4) Jacques PrĂ©vert (1900-1977), French poet; James Price “J. P.” Johnson (1894-1955), American ragtime and blues pianist and composer; J. C. Johnson (1896-1981), jazz pianist and songwriter; Willie Hilton Napoleon “Nappy” Lamare (1907-1988), American guitarist, banjoist, composer, and singer.

(5) Chick Webb (1909-1939), American drummer and bandleader; Hartzell Strathdene “Tiny” Parham (1900-1943), Canadian American pianist, organist, and bandleader; John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie (1917-1993), American trumpeter and bandleader; Thelonius Monk (1917-1982), American jazz pianist and composer.

(6) W. Benton Overstreet, American songwriter; Perry “Mule” Bradford (1893-1970), American pianist, songwriter, singer, and producer; Buddy DeSilva, American songwriter; Dorothy Baker (1907-1968), jazz writer best known for Young Man with a Horn, a novel about the life of Leon “Bix” Deiderbecke; Charlie Christian (1916-1942), American guitarist; Joe Sullivan (1906-1971), American pianist and composer.

(7) Nathan Irving “Nat” Hentoff (1925-), American writer and jazz historian; Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967), American composer, arranger, and pianist; Tony Scott (1921-), American clarinetist and saxophonist; Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920-1955), American alto saxophonist and one of the most influential soloists in jazz; Friedrich Gulda (1930-), Austrian pianist, flutist, baritone saxophonist, singer, and composer; Charles Mingus (1922-1979), American double bass player, pianist, composer, and bandleader.

Thursday, August 27, 2015



Living Tree 
Robert Morgan 

It’s said they planted trees by graves
to soak up spirits of the dead
through roots into the growing wood.
The favorite in the burial yards
I knew was common juniper.
One could do worse than pass into
such a species. I like to think
that when I’m gone the chemicals
and yes the spirit that was me
might be searched out by subtle roots
and raised with sap through capillaries
into an upright, fragrant trunk,
and aromatic twigs and bark,
through needles bright as hoarfrost to
the sunlight for a century
or more, in wood repelling rot
and standing tall with monuments
and statues there on the far hill,
erect as truth, a testimony,
in ground that’s dignified by loss,
around a melancholy tree
that’s pointing toward infinity.




Wednesday, August 26, 2015


Ran across this in cyber space-

“If you follow the crowd, you will likely get no further than the crowd. If you walk alone, you’re likely to end up in places no one has ever been before. Being an achiever is not without its difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. The unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time is that when people finally realize you were right, they’ll simply say it was obvious to everyone all along. You have two choices in life. You can dissolve into the mainstream, or you can choose to become an achiever and be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must strive to be what no else but you can be.”
― Alan Ashley-Pitt

Yep.


Go to the library. Find a massive art history book. Flip through page by page and witness the creations of those whom
dared to be different. Those with enough gumption to break way from the norm and be themselves and paint the way they wanted.

“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” Chuck Palahniuk

Tuesday, August 25, 2015



Ah, the never ending discussion about songwriting rules. Maybe formulas or guidelines would be a better name. Or, even recipe would work. What ever the nomenclature, I enjoy sitting quietly listening to banter about acceptable and non acceptable uses of
verses, choruses, bridges, intros, outros, and middle eights. And of course, melody mistakes.

I have looked high and low and never found the published rule book. Where do you read the rules?

If you listen to songs across a wide spectrum of styles and years,
you will find similarities and differences.

If a rule book was written from dissecting all top 40 songs since the birth of radio and records, it would be thick and all inclusive.
Let me clarify, it would be thick from listing all forms that have been used by top 40 songs. I don't think one rule would emerge from a strictly empirical study.

So, where did the rules come from?




Monday, August 24, 2015



Mozart at Seventeen 
Claire Keyes 

I’d done it again: locked out of my car
that evening after the concert.
No friendly red salute as I flicked the unlock icon.

No keys and my stupid car remained indifferent
while I made the dreaded phone call
to my husband with the news

and could he come to the rescue.
The only bright thing that night was the symphony
Mozart composed at seventeen,

the year his father brought him to Vienna
to seek a position in the court of Empress Maria Theresa.
Only Salieri had won the keys to the court

and there was nothing for Amadeus.
So what does he do?
He attends the symphonies of Haydn,

glorious and inventive,
and over a period of weeks produces a music
filled with restless, angular melodies,

the oboe and flute freed into colorful bursts
that force the violins to yield. Only in the andante
does he settle into more introverted passions.

He was a teenager after all, destined
to trump Salieri, some say even Haydn.
Though he doesn’t know this at the time.

Maybe suspects it, so that three centuries later
as I was walking towards my car one evening
after a concert, fishing for my keys,

Mozart seemed to whisper: In clarity lies the serene.


....................................................

Yeah.

in clarity lies the serene

clarity
clearness or lucidity as to perception or understanding; freedom from indistinctness or ambiguity

serene
calm, peaceful, or tranquil; unruffled:
a serene landscape; serene old age 

Sunday, August 23, 2015


Yep.



A young man, eating an apple, standing under a multitude of naked cloths lines, holding a freshly plucked, large combed chicken.

OK, we agree.

What would the next frame be?

300 word story due tomorrow.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

I Wasn't Born To Follow
Carole King/Gerry Goffin

I love this song. Did a philosophy 101 presentation with the lyrics in the early '70s. Can't remember the grade exactly, but I am sure it was one of the first six letters of the alphabet.

The Byrds, my all time favorite band, did a phenomenal job covering it.

Masterfully used in Easy Rider. Painting the feeling of adventure perfectly. The song ends at the Sacred Mountain gas station where the hitchhiker shares some mescaline with Wyatt and Billy. Perfect!



I wasn't Born To Follow
Carole King/Gerry Goffin

Oh, I'd rather go and journey
Where the diamond crescent's glowing and
Run across the valley
Beneath the sacred mountain

And wander through the forest
Where the trees have leaves of prisms
And break the light in colors
That no one knows the names of

And when it's time, I'll go and wait
Beside a legendary fountain
Till I see your form reflected
In it's clear and jeweled waters

And if you think I'm ready
You may lead me to the chasm
Where the rivers of our vision
Flow into one another

I will watch her dive beneath
The white cascading waters
She may beg, she may plead
She may argue with her logic

And then mention all the things I'll lose
That really have no value
In the end she will surely know
I wasn't born to follow


check it out








Friday, August 21, 2015



Austin Kleon's book, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered is packed with gems.

Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.

I agree. But, a little bit goes a long way.


Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. “You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern,” says psychology professor Paul Bloom. “And if that’s right, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery.” But our brains don’t work that way. “When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it— how much they like it, how valuable it is— is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.” 

Fact! Especially when pertaining to abstract art. Titles and one or two sentence descriptions add depth and mystery.

In their book, Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker recount an experiment in which they set out to test this hypothesis: “Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.” First, they went out to thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales and bought a bunch of “insignificant” objects for an average of $ 1.25 an object. Then, they hired a bunch of writers, both famous and not-so-famous hired a bunch of writers, both famous and infamous, to invent a story “that attributed significance” to each object. Finally, they listed each object on eBay, using the invented stories as the object’s description, and whatever they had originally paid for the object as the auction’s starting price. By the end of the experiment, they had sold $ 128.74 worth of trinkets for $ 3,612.51. 

Yeah. Humans are suckers for a cool story. Just like restaurant menus, we eat first with our brains. Which fish sandwich would taste better:

1) Breaded cod on dark rye.

2) Fresh Icelandic cod, wild caught from the icy blue north Atlantic virgin waters, lightly dusted with organic flour, flash fried in non trans fat cholesterol free peanut oil, served on thick sliced oven hot Amish Heidelberg pumpernickel bread.

I would pick number 2 too.

  

“To fake a photograph, all you have to do is change the caption. To fake a painting, change the attribution.” —Errol Morris






Thursday, August 20, 2015

Ah, the joy of discovering.
My young feet got muddy walking the Mississippi's banks
with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.




The First Voyages Out 
Paul Martin 


Walking across the bridge on my way
to school, I’d lean over the railing

and stare down at the river
until I was moving

on a ship’s stern
past the wooded banks

and the smoky mill towns toward
the ocean and the shining world beyond

I was beginning to read about -
Egypt, Rome, Greece and the Parthenon,

their golden light drawing me
past my friends’ shouts to hurry

or we’d be late, their voices drowning
in the wake of my departure.




Wednesday, August 19, 2015


Before You Go
     Walt Sample  



Before you go 
String me along with golden sparks of high mountain air
Tune my kaleidoscope mind to Scarborough fair 
Sparkling facets chocolaty sips of tomorrow's wine
Scarlet cherubs sing parsley sage rosemary and thyme 

Before you go kiss the rainbow
Minutes taste like licorice sleep
Cheddar lines swim down Colby Street
Feel like a bowl of sun dog bubbles
Licking sugar off an emerald chuckle

Before you go 
Tell Cap’n Crunch to chill and get back in his box 
He’s pickin’ fights with Sugar Bear and Goldie Locks 
Alpha bits spellin’ trouble better eat the scrabble game 
       Tony the tiger stole the Special K and jumped the gravy train                                          

Before you go kiss the rainbow
Minutes taste like licorice sleep
Cheddar lines swim down Colby Street
Feel like a bowl of sun dog bubbles
Licking sugar off an emerald chuckle


Tuesday, August 18, 2015

A mule will be forever loyal if you loyal to them.
A mule never forgets a harsh word or the smack of a hand.
Make working together a fun rewarding activity.

The poem Cane saddens me but, I honestly believe that the vast majority of people who work with mules and horses
do not mistreat their working partners.






Cane
Cleopatra Mathis

When the mule balked, he hit him 
sometimes with the flat of a hand 
upside the head; more often 
the stick he carried did its angry trick. 
The mule's job was to power the press, 
iron on iron that wrung the sugar 
out of cane, circling under the coarse 
beam attached to his shoulders and neck. 
That mule of my childhood 
was black, remained blackly obedient 
as round and round he made himself 
the splintered hand of a clock, the groan 
and squeak of machinery chewing 
the reedy stalks to pulp, each second 
delivering another sweet thin drop 
into the black pot at the center. 


He hit him with a rag, old headrag, 
but the animal winced only with the thrash 
of a cane stalk itself—he squinted 
under the rule of that bamboo. 
The sun was another caning 
on his black-hot flesh. He was slow 
as the blackstrap syrup the boiled sugar made, 
so true to the circle he dragged 
we hardly saw him. We loved the rustling 
house of green cane, blind in that field 
of tropical grasses whose white plumes 
announced the long season's wait. 
We yearned for the six-foot stem, the eventual 
six pieces the machete sliced 
at the joints, then the woody exterior 
peeled back lengthwise with a blade. 
It was a black hand we waited for, his job 
to lay bare the grainy fiber we chewed. 
That juice on our tongues 
was his sweetness at work. 
Chester was his name, he kept the mule.




Monday, August 17, 2015






The Greatest Discovery
Bernie Taupin & Elton John

Peering out of tiny eyes
The grubby hands that gripped the rail
Wiped the window clean of frost
As the morning air laid on the latch

A whistle awakened someone there
Next door to the nursery just down the hall
A strange new sound you never heard before
A strange new sound that makes boys explore

Tread neat so small those little feet
Amid the morning his small heart beats
So much excitement yesterday
That must be rewarded must be displayed

Large hands lift him through the air
Excited eyes contain him there
The eyes of those he loves and knows
But what's this extra bed just here

His puzzled head tipped to one side
Amazement swims in those bright green eyes
Glancing down upon this thing
That make strange sounds, strange sounds that sing

In those silent happy seconds
That surround the sound of this event
A parent smile is made in moments
They have made for you a friend

And all you ever learned from them
Until you grew much older
Did not compare with when they said
This is your brand new brother
This is your brand new brother
This is your brand new brother




Check out this great live performance from 1970.

Sunday, August 16, 2015



John Lennon
Mary Jo Salter


The music was already turning sad,
      those fresh-faced voices singing in a round
            the lie that time could set its needle back

and play from the beginning. Had you lived
      to eighty, as you’d wished, who knows?—you might  
            have broken from the circle of that past

more ours than yours. Never even sure  
      which was the truest color for your hair
            (it changed with each photographer), we claimed

you for ourselves; called you John and named  
      the day you left us (spun out like a reel—
            the last broadcast to prove you’d lived at all)

an end to hope itself. It isn’t true,
      and worse, does you no justice if we call
            your death the death of anything but you.


II

It put you in the headlines once again:
      years after you’d left the band, you joined  
            another—of those whose lives, in breaking, link

all memory with their end. The studio  
      of history can tamper with you now,
            as if there’d always been a single track

chance traveled on, and your discordant voice  
      had led us to the final violence.
            Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan,

had catalogued your favorite foods, your views  
      on monarchy and war, and gaily clipped
            your quips and daily antics from the news,

I keep a loving record of your death.  
      All the evidence is in—of what,
            and to what end, it’s hard to figure out,

riddles you might have beat into a song.  
      A younger face of yours, a cover shot,
            peered from all the newsstands as if proof

of some noteworthy thing you’d newly done.


Saturday, August 15, 2015


1) sharpen pencils



?) sing masterpiece 



What steps lie in-between creation and performance?

What steps influence the applause meter the most?

I wish I had the answers.

Imagine a golden floored 
silver walled 
Herculean sized room
 with a diamond studded ceiling. 
Opium incense lingers
like a pregnant hush.
In the center
a five star song sits
on a cherub guarded pedestal.
The gigantic chamber has 1000 doors.

There are many ways to create the masterpiece.

We blaze our own trails.


I think it is easier to identify trouble along the path.

Things you know would improve your songs
if you worked on them.

Putting myself in the songwriters confessional,

I do know my weaknesses.

Melody and musical hooks.

I need to tattoo this advice from the master of riffs
on my nose.

"Write a GREAT song, and then sit down and come up with a riff/hook around the root chord or a few of the chords."

Angus Young






Friday, August 14, 2015




Angel Spread Your Wings
Danny O'Keefe

Prisoners of the heart in search of love and peace
Hung in desperation, longing for release
I'm just a traveler, angel, you're my ride
Take me past the place I've passed the last time that I died

Angel spread your wings, I want to fly away with you
Take me in your arms, I know you're dying to
Fly away forever, fly away forever, fly away forever
Angel spread your wings

Angel comes into my room, it's dark and so is she
Wants to know if she can take me soaring out to sea
Lying in her darkness like a child awaiting birth
Angel comes and takes me for everything I'm worth

Angel spread your wings, I want to fly away with you
Take me in your arms, I know you're dying to
Fly away forever, fly away forever, fly away forever
Angel spread your wings

Angel spread your wings, I want to fly away with you
Spread your wings and take me
Spread your wings and make me
I know, I know, I know, I know you're dying to
Fly away forever, fly away forever, fly away forever
Angel spread your wings

Angel spread your wings, I want to fly away with you
Angel spread your wings, I want to fly away with you
Angel spread your wings, angel spread your wings




Check out Judy Collins cover.
I don't know if I like it or not.
I just keep on listening. 
Yep, it's that kind of morning.

Thursday, August 13, 2015



Throwing Away the Alarm Clock

Charles Bukowski



my father always said, “early to bed and
early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy
and wise.”



it was lights out at 8 p.m. in our house
and we were up at dawn to the smell of
coffee, frying bacon and scrambled
eggs.



my father followed this general routine
for a lifetime and died young, broke,
and, I think, not too
wise.



taking note, I rejected his advice and it
became, for me, late to bed and late
to rise.



now, I’m not saying that I’ve conquered
the world but I’ve avoided
numberless early traffic jams, bypassed some
common pitfalls
and have met some strange, wonderful
people



one of whom
was
myself-someone my father
never
knew.



Wednesday, August 12, 2015



Blow up your tv!

One meteor per minute will be slashing across the heavens for the next few days. New moon coming in Friday so midnight black will help the contrast.

Grab a smooth rock for your pillow, use the stars for your blanket and enjoy! Popcorn optional.


Monday, August 10, 2015


Margie Drees is the newest member of the barn!

Welcome Margie by checking out her songs and wonderful video.


There is a link to her video in Barnagie Hall as well.





Sunday, August 9, 2015

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
Robert Hughes

See, it is good to have a head full of what was I thinkin' when you read your lyrics the day after creation.






“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the coloring, sportsmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
John Lubbock  

Yep. How about songs? What we hear depends on what we listen for; a bass player will hear the bottom, lyricist the words, guitar player the chops, singer the singing, publisher the flaws, NSAI critiquer the structure, songwriter the metaphors, radio listener the melody and on. Tune in so all parts are heard as a whole. Imagine looking at an colossal red oak tree standing alone in a field. Thousands of pieces joined together making one tree.
Like a finished 5000 piece jig saw puzzle see both at the same time.



 

Saturday, August 8, 2015

School Supply time of year!

Stumbled across this post on Austin Kleon's
blog. Talked about writers and artists
using basic school necessities.
Nothin' handier than a simple composition book.
You can find them 3 for a dollar!
Grab a sack of number twos.
8 pack of crayons.
8 tray watercolor pan.
Turn the mind on and let it flow! 

Paul Thek for example:


From Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective:
Thek [was] an avid keeper of journals, producing over a hundred between 1969 and 1980. Complex and varied, the journals form an intimate and often intense portrait of an energetic mind. Most are written in ordinary school notebooks, with routine accounts of Thek’s days punctuated by emotionally raw passages of self-reflection, analysis of his closest (and, at times, most troubled) personal relationships, and as time progressed, evidence of a growing paranoia. In perfect script, he copied page after page of writings that he admired by Saint Augustine, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, William Blake, and others. Copying was clearly a meditation for him, a spiritual exercise and, as such, an antidote to anxiety and to what he knew was his own pettiness and anger. But the journals are full of moments of joyful exuberance and artistic bravura as well: celebrations of sex, silly word games, and a range of visual expression, from simple marks and comic sketches to intimate, exquisite watercolors of the sea.









Check out a nice short video-





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