U-Turn
Feb 20, 2009 sojourn
Last Sunday I was pretty bummed. I had hoped to make a road trip to Nashville with a co-writer friend of mine, Allen. He and I were going to cruise west, spend the week hanging out, writing, just having fun with it all. This was to be a very beneficial trip as I was to get introduced to a few of Allen’s relationships — some very solid writers and club owners/managers.
So, around 6:00PM, while hanging out, guitar in hand, thinking, “dang, I really should have found a way to make this trip”, I noticed an email on my Blackberry from a bass player friend in Delaware. He shared some details about a scenario in need of a bassist to cover some hot young guitarist’s artist showcase dates, and said I should make the call to the owner of a studio where both my friend (a fine musician who’s played with notables like Bad Co.) and this young up and coming artist record their material. I figured, what the heck, and called the studio the next day… no answer, so I left a message. Later that Monday evening, I got a return call. Seems these guys had exhausted their stable of bass players and are down to the wire. Footnote: I’ve been here before… a situation that comes to mind is a door knock while sitting home on a Friday night and being asked by a drummer and keyboardist to get dressed and grab a bass — theirs was in the hospital with food poisoning. I had a blast, and the gig just a few weeks later.
Anyway, the call with the studio owner/producer was pretty brief. I sensed both calm desperation and a good bit of caution on the part of the person I spoke with, justifiably so. He was only talking with me because my friend in Delaware said I could handle the gig… even I had my doubts at first, then figured, what the heck. So, I grabbed the songs off his me.com site and downloaded them onto my iPod. Over the next couple of days I listened through a couple of times, and now have 4-5 hours with bass in hand lifting bass parts off eight well written songs by this young guitar player, singer, and songwriter (who shall remain nameless for now).
Next step is to meet with the guys pulling together the band for the fast approaching shows to see if I fit the mold and have the chops to cut the gig. Whether I get the nod or not is not as important as the fact that if I had made the trip to Nashville I would not have had the opportunity to meet with these guys. Sure, the trip to N’ville could have opened some doors, but this opportunity could actually have a much greater ROI.
Why?
These gentlemen own a well established, productive studio. The recordings I’ve been learning off are out of this studio are high quality tracks, and were not only recorded at said studio (which also shall remain nameless for the time being), but produced by the owners, one of whom also plays drums, percussion and bass on the tracks!
I’m very much looking forward to see how things pan out… I have about a 75% grip on the songs, and should be close to 90% efficiency by the time we meet Sunday morning. The material is right up my alley, and there’s very little doubt in my mind I can do this thing… the opportunity is there because I made a u-turn away from what I wanted to do to where life was calling me to be.
Tags: best laid plan, opportunity knocks, serendipity, u-turn
A-Musing
Jul 29, 2008 muse
Last week I was cleaning my studio/office, specifically my desk, glancing at notes I’ve been taking for months, and came across one piece of paper with some scratch about a song evaluation, so I saved it and went on clearing off my desk. See, I’d been reading about how clutter can inhibit creativity, and thought, hey the well has been pretty dry of late, the room’s in some disarray, why not?
Things came along nicely, got some new shelving put together, some dusting, tossed a bunch of stuff, yeah, this is looking pretty good! So, second pass through the pile of “maybe” stuff to keep or notes to transfer into a notebook, and I’m back to this piece of paper with the song notes, and I spot a chord progression I’d jotted down, along with a hook idea that read “I Don’t Like Secrets”.
As I messed around a bit with the chords, a melody popped out pretty quick. So, in an attempt to show a bit of discipline, I grabbed my pencil and notebook and headed away from guitar and studio and started writing. A few lines make the sheet, nothing that seemed all that promising, yet, these first few lines turned into the first verse, almost verbatim.
Within five days I have a complete song, run it through a feedback session on SongU, get a few good ideas for taking it to the next level with very minor tweaks to either lyric or music. This isn’t the norm, so as I think back over the last week and the amount of time I put into not only cleaning my room, but restructuring my approach to disciplining myself as a writer, listening and reading more, and not trying to write under formulaic constraints, and out comes a song that I not only really enjoyed writing, but enjoy playing and singing.
Needless to say, I’m taking this as a sign that more good songs are right around the corner, but it’s going to take even more persistence and drive to establish consistency in my writing and output — perhaps most importantly, I need to enjoy the process as much as I have over the last week.
Click here if you’d like to take a listen to “Secrets”… enjoy!
Tags: indie, muse, serendipity