Category Archives: Songwriting

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

MusicMaking: The River Rides the Beat Beneath Us

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This is a Loop Composition, inspired by a recent trip to the Delaware River Gap, where I tried to pay attention to the rhythm of a river that cut through the section where we were staying and working.

Along with the various waterfalls, where the sound came crashing down, there were calm sections, places where the water bubbled over rocks, narrowed gaps where the stream zigged and zagged.

Each of those sections of the river informed sections of this composition, as I worked to layer sounds and loops and beats together to capture my remembering of the riverway.

Peace (sounds like),
Kevin

Open Songwriting: Bad Weather Blues Demo

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Bad Weather Blues collageEvery now and then, I get bored with traditional tuning on my guitar, and try my hand (uneducated as it is in this vein) with open tuning. I’m not quite sure what I’m often doing as I tweak the knobs on the guitar, so I aim to make sure the open chords sound OK in a certain key (often D). On Saturday, that’s what I was doing and then this song emerged from the rubble of my mind, thinking of climate change and political inaction, so I began writing (Give Me Shelter) Bad Weather Blues.

The photo collage above shows how the lyrics moved from notebook sketches, to a more structured draft of the song, to a sort of final version (some changes were later made). There is a purposeful reference to Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm in there.  I have no idea why I used red pen for revision, other than it was handy and nearby.

I then recorded the song yesterday with Soundtrap, with just guitar and vocals, less than 24 hours after writing it. I mulled over adding some drums and other instruments, and decided it needed to be simple and somewhat raw for the intentions of what I was doing with it. This visual tracking (three stages of the song) of writing is helpful for me, as it helps me remember to curate my creative endeavors with making music.

And I think the song came out OK for a demo. Give it a listen, if you have a moment:

Peace (and shelter),
Kevin

A Whale’s Lantern Collaboration 4: Portraits

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Photobooth Song Arc CollaborationThe fourth iteration of A Whale’s Lantern — a musical collaboration on a theme with random partners, mostly from the Mastodon social networking space — has just been released this weekend, and a song I co-wrote/co-produced with my partner — Bobbo — is the track called Photobooth. The theme was “portraits.”

I wrote about the construction of the Photobooth song from idea to final track here.  But now you can listen, too, to what we ended up making together:

And the entire album of music is on Bandcamp — along with all the other three Whale’s Lantern adventures, which I also have tracks from partnerships — for free, although you are invited to pay a little if you download the tracks.

Peace (in the listening),
Kevin