A Very Rough Intro

Overview:

I've been toying around with a pretty simple question this past year - why haven't I been writing music? Sure, there's a lot of things I can think of that take time away from writing, but... I haven't really *tried* to make the time. And, more importantly, I didn't think that I had time to be writing music on top of teaching, going to gym, driving through Seattle traffic etc.

But it's Summer and I'm home alone with the cat, so here we go!

The cat in question

The Project:

Love songs have been around FOR-EV-ER. People like listening to 'em, people like writing 'em. They're been done in so many ways, so many styles, that I can pick just about any artist and/or genre and find a love song that epitomizes/embodies its creator.

In each post on this blog, I will do a mini-exploration of a musician/era/genre/band/style/ what-have-you, talk about what I notice when I listen to the music, talk about how that music connects with who I am/what I like to play. Maybe it'll connect to a story about having 7 different David Bowie posters in my college apartment, maybe I'll remember a story about having approximately zero stage presence/self-awareness as a budding musician and telling the audience a minute-long story about a tornado video I watched that has *nothing* to do with what I was supposed to be playing... who knows!

Once I expound for a bit, noticing things about the song and making those personal connections, I will write my *own* song based on the style/sound of the over-arching topic. For instance, if this was my first post, I'd do my best write a song in the style of Paul McCartney and Wings... but I'm really not feeling up to tackling Paul McCartney in my first go here. Big shoes to fill and all that.

The Purpose:

1) Yay for creative outlets!

For me, writing music is one of those things that's both super challenging but also quite a bit of fun. Even though I'm a bit out of practice, I still observe things I could write songs about daily, even going so far as to track the chords in my head and start humming melodies over the top of them.

Now, I'm going to commit to recording these here just to see what happens. ~


2) I love my wife!

Daww

Not every song I write is going to be a love song dedicated to my wife (I think ya'll would get over that pretty quick), but she's certainly going to be the main inspiration for what I do with a lot of this. Unless I sing something like, "I'm in love with my car!", you can safely assume that I'm referring to her... unless I say otherwise.





3) I like a challenge!

I'll eventually start taking requests/ideas for some genres/artists to tackle. Some of which, I imagine, will require me to go a bit out of my comfort zone of "Acoustic David Bowie and Beatles 24/7."

Great! Good! The day I stop pushing myself to try and learn new things is the day I should stop being a teacher. Let's keep this learning train rolling during the summer. :-)


Conclusion:
I have no idea how long this will go, how many posts I'll make, or how many people are even going to take the time to read these things as a post them.

Maybe it's once a day, maybe it's a few times per week. I don't want to start just dumping random half-baked songs out to fill a quota, but at the same time, I want to feel like I have the freedom to start spewing a lot of content if the mood strikes.