Category Archives: Songwriting

Slice of Life: Sitting Down with a Song

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(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

I was following the Democratic election news out of Iowa about the first caucus, thinking about where we are as a country and where we might be heading (although, who can say with any certainty?) and this song began to write itself. Sometimes, writing is like that. So I spent some time with it, sitting with the words and the chords, scribbling in and scribbling out ideas, and letting it flow forth onto the page, and then into the microphone.

As usual, the notebook page is a mess of ideas.

Song notebook

It began as a song of resistance and defiance in this age of Trump and the GOP’s control of government – the title of Bend ‘Em ‘Til You Break ‘Em gives it away — but something arced for me about halfway through, and the third and fourth stanzas are more hopeful, more optimistic, more reasoned.

I’m not driven anger
not driven by hate
I’m driven by the chance
you might reciprocate

You hold out a hand
you might invite me in
we might find it in common
a place to begin

Take a listen to the demo:

Peace (singing it),
Kevin

Annotated Sound Files: Turning Terry’s Poem into Song

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Terry Poem Song Annotated

Yesterday, I shared the song I created after reading Terry’s poem. This morning, after reading some lovely comments from him about process and time and effort, I went back into my sound project and began to annotate where his words influenced what sounds. I found it a useful bit of reflection and I suspect Terry might find it a bit intriguing, too.

Note: Shrinking the project to see all the tracks made everything tiny. Apologies.

Read yesterday’s post to better understand the annotations

Peace (sounds like dawn),
Kevin

Words Translated Into Song

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My friend, Terry, posted a beautiful poem of a morning with his wife, on the porch, at his blog on his birthday. I read it a few times and thought I could just hear the glimmers of a song simmering below the surface of this lines. Luckily, I had some time to make just that — a song interpretation of Terry’s poem, with sound files, beats, loops and small snippets of his poem (read by me).

What I find interesting is how I was both trying to capture my own feeling of reading Terry’s words but also being intentional in taking it in a new direction. If you read his poem, you should hear some of his moments. You may also wonder what I was thinking, as you listen to other elements. Mostly, I was trying to capture the heartbeat of his piece.

Doing this kind of work brings you deeper into the text, a closer kind of reading. Every word has the possibility of something to give. I hope Terry enjoys the interpretation, left for him as a gift for his birthday.

Peace (in song),
Kevin

Slice of Life: No Guitar … No Problem

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(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

It’s often during in-between moments — the lull of the evening — where I will grab my acoustic guitar and just play for a bit as a way to step aside from the day. A sort of acoustic reprieve. Sometimes, new songs emerge from these burst of playing sessions. Mostly, not. Usually, it’s just a chance to play.

I had this inspiration to maybe try to write another holiday song because I had challenged my teenage son to make a holiday song, as he is an accomplished beat-maker with Logic, and he just laughed me off. I went upstairs to get my guitar … only to suddenly remember that I had left my guitar in my classroom at school. I have been doing some guitar playing with a student who is writing his own holiday song that he wants to perform in front of classmates.

Hmmm.

I still had this melody and idea of bells jangling around in my head, so I queued up an online music production platform I use quite a bit — Soundtrap — and plugged in my small MIDI keyboard, and then began to compose the holiday song. It’s built off the echoes of the main Jingle Bells riff, and I had quite fun laying in sounds. The song structure is pretty simple: melody-break-melody.

After finishing the track, I decided I wanted to make the audio track into a video version, so I searched around for some copyright-free video of snow falling — I wanted the visuals to be simple but moving — and then used iMovie to quickly pull the audio and video together.

So, you know, happy holidays and all that …

Peace (play it forward),
Kevin

MusicMaking: She Makes a Choice (Path and Prayers)

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It’s been disheartening to watch as more and more states seek to limit women’s access to health care, all in hopes that a test case will reach the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade. It irks me to no end that these conservative leaders want to destroy lives under the guise of compassion, and use their religion as a curtain to hide behind. And who’s left with few choices and little support? The women. The women always are left paying the price.

I wrote this particular song some times ago both as a protest and to experiment with writing and producing a song nearly entirely on my iPad with the Garageband App.

Peace (and choice),
Kevin

Slice of Life: I Heard Me on Pandora

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Gift of Peace on Pandora(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

Last year, my friend and I released a holiday song called A Gift of Peace (For Christmas), more as an experiment than anything else. We did the whole thing — copyright lyrics and music, went into a recording studio, enlisted CD Baby to distribute the song through streaming services, and even hired my son to create a video story for the song.

Pandora was one of those services that took a long time to allow our song into its mix, but yesterday, while doing other things in the kitchen, our song started playing onto Pandora (I had created a station called A Gift of Peace) and I rushed to give it a thumbs up and to call my wife. We then danced for a bit around the kitchen to my song playing on Pandora.

If you hear my song on your station, give it a thumbs up, won’t you?

Peace (gifting it to you),
Kevin

The Noise is the Story/ The Story is the Noise

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NoiseVember BandCamp

For all of November, I took part in something called NoiseVember over on Mastodon — creating small soundtracks of music. Some of my pieces were intentionally noisy. Some were not. I experimented across a variety of different platforms to make the music — from Soundtrap, to WolframTones, to Garageband, to Thumbjam, to Google’s Music Lab, and more.

In my head, I had a vague, loose idea of what connected the tracks, a slow threading over the month. I could glimpse the music telling the story of a walk through a place — woods, or forests, or something. But it was only at the end of the month, as I listened again to the entire batch together, all of them unfolding, and finally gave discrete titles to each of the tracks that I began to “see” the story as a whole through the “listening.”

Maybe next up is the writing of the story itself …

It’s possible only I can “read” this story this way because I composed the music and that no one else can envision it. That’s OK, too. But all the tracks are up in Bandcamp, free for download or for listening, and if you are interested, I invite you to wander over. You could even write the story, too.

Listen to NoiseVember: Each Path A Story

Peace (what the story sounds like),
Kevin

Slice of Life: A Musical Moment

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(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

My guitar has been sitting in the corner for a few weeks as I have been busy with school, family, etc. I picked it up and within 15 minutes, this entire demo song was done — lyrics, music, demo. Sometimes, the muse flows through with the Pen and Paper Blues.

Peace (singing it the best I can),
Kevin

Making Music and Noise in November

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Noise flickr photo by AILAVIU. shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Sometimes, I will stumble upon something that sparks my interest and feeds my creative spirit, in small bursts. Many times it is writing or poetry. But for November, I saw a call for small pieces of music making over at Mastodon, and decided to dive into NoiseVember, creating small pieces of music across many different apps and platforms, and sharing each day in that federated networking site.

I view what I am doing with NoiseVember as merely experimental, and I am mostly determined to be spending about 15 minutes or less on each track. Many of short — less than a minute long. I keep the “noise” aspect in mind, but also seek to bury melody lines and maybe interesting angles and aspects to the compositions. Some of the tracks, as a result, come out better than others. Some are just plain odd.

Here are the first nine tracks I have done for NoiseVember. Another day, I’ll post more about the places where I am making the music that I am gathering and sharing out.

Peace (sounds like noise),
Kevin