Here's a great way to kick off the weekend: Carene Lydia is doing 2 sets of eclectic songs at the Vandam Diner, and I'm playing guitar for her. Here's the deets:

Carene Lydia
with yours truly on guitar
Friday, Feb 5, 2010
6:00-8:00PM
Vandam Diner
12 Vandam Street  (C or E to Spring Street)
 

Come on down and hear this lady sing the blues!

Hey kids,

This past weekend, my good friend Terry Christopher and I went up to contribute our talents to Newburgh, NY's World AIDS day event, organized by Markus Payne. Terry videotaped the event, and here is his (our) rendition of the song, Wade in the Water. Hope you enjoy it.

xo,

M

On Tuesday, I attended the "Pro Studio World Tour" event that Apple is sponsoring to promote their pro video and audio applications, Final Cut Studio Pro and Logic Studio Pro. Amazing stuff. Well worth checking out. One of the most impressive new features of both applications were the time manipulation tools. The time manipulation tool in FCP (Command + J) has been expanded, with a lot more control on how it behaves in the timeline. And in Logic, you can now quantize audio regions in much the same way you quantize MIDI regions, and the "flextime" feature has to be seen to be believed.

I'm going to keep this short, because I know not everyone who reads this blog does this kind of work, but this round of upgrades is a dramatic step up. Avid/Digidesign have cause to worry.

Hey all,

It's been a long break, but summer is a crazy time, out of town, yada, yada, yada.

But we're back for another season now, so look for more podcasts and more music news in the coming weeks. Next up, the beautiful Julie Clark talks to me about her music.

See you soon.

xo,

M

My good friend and extremely talented musician/singer/songwriter Amy Clarke is in town for the weekend, and she's performing at The Bitter End on Monday at 7:30PM. I'll be sitting in and adding some guitar to her song From Here. It' promises to be a very good show.  $10 + 2-drink minimum, the proceeds of which are split between an Environmental non-profit called Amazon Conservation Team, and the Artist.

You can't see much in New York City anymore for less than $20. Come down and support live music AND the Environment at the same time.

Hey y'all.  The lovely and talented Carene Lydia is back doin' her thing at Mood Restaurant  in Kew Gardens, Queens.  Some old songs, and some new songs, and I'm backing her up on guitar. If you're in the neighborhood, or if you feel you need a break from the craziness of a Manhattan Saturday night, come out to the provinces and join us for an eclectic evening of music.

Carene Lydia
@ Mood Restaurant
Saturday, August 15, 11:30PM

Read Carene's bio and get more info below the fold.

Carene’s eclectic musical tastes began during her childhood. As a very young girl she listened along with her father to folk singers Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, jazz artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole and big band music of the 1940s and 1950s. For a special treat Sundays were devoted to Latin American music: everything from tangos of the 1930s to the plenas, bombas, and danzas of her parents' native Puerto Rico. At her show you will hear blues, folk, pop, and standards that all have one thing in common: “When I sing I want the audience to believe that every word coming out of my mouth is the truth. I try to sing from the heart – the same as my vocal heroes, Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.”

When it was time to pick a career Carene chose to work as a live sound engineer because she wanted to be close to music and didn’t think she could cut it as a singer, her true passion. It wasn’t long before she realized that she could do better than a lot of the people she was working for, so she found the courage to get on stage, coming full-circle when she joined Pete Seeger’s NYC Streetsingers. She has also provided powerful back-up vocals both live and in the studio for the blues-based rock band, After One.

Now Carene is back at the place she calls home, the stage, singing old and new songs, and sharing her life through music.

On Thursday evening, my good friend and fellow songwriter John Raymond Pollard allowed a few of us in my songwriting group to preview his new CD, entitled simply Dreams. And what a treat it was. From the whimsical, thoughtful Living an Alternative Dream, to the austere, haunting The World of Tarot, to the final rocker The Divide (By the Time I Get to Phoenix), this is a trip worth taking. We sat in what ended up being the first hot and humid evening of this unusually cool summer season, drinking some delicious wine (also provided by John), and taking this thoroughly enjoyable musical journey.

United Airlines broke this guy's guitar and wouldn't take responsibility. Here's his revenge. If you can book anywhere but United, do it.

The third and final episode of my interview with the inestimable Dan Manjovi.

Manny's Music in New York City is closing its doors at the end of this month. Kind of. For years now, it's been owned by the mega music store chain Sam Ash, and now it's going to become the Sam Ash guitar store. Apparently not even the current staff is going to change much. So yes, Manny's Music is "going out of business," but it's been out of business for years. It's just now the name is gone as well. But being a good guitar player, I made my pilgrimage to 48th street and 6th Ave to pay my respects. I do eventually need a tele and would love a hollow-body, and I'm still toying with the idea of getting a more versatile bass.

UPDATE: I'm bumping this up to the top, just for today, to get the word out. Then it's back to Songtalk as usual. 

Okay, departing from the usual today, but I have a friend who's selling their house, and it looks like it would be a very cool place. If anyone is thinking of getting out of the City and still being close enough to commute in, you should look at this place. It's 10 minutes away from Beacon, NY (just over 60 miles from midtown Manhattan). There is a train stop in Beacon, and it's around an hour 15 to Grand Central, 1:05 if you catch the express. If I could afford a down-payment, I'd consider buying it myself. Check out the "Artist Space," which could easily be converted into a recording studio.

If you're interested, the info is on the bottom of the picture. It gets a little small, so here's the phone and web address for the realtor:

Peggy Rose: (office) 845-831-3331 (cell) 845-546-2614

www.joncarrealaty.com

You can also drop Elizabeth an email if you have any questions about it. For a better view and more info, you can also click on the image below.

Wish you were here.

My conversation with the firecely talented singer/songwriter/recording artist/producer Terry Radigan continues in this edition of Songtalk Podcast. (right click or control+click and download linked file). We talk about touchy music reviewers, sad love songs, economic writing, fun with major and minor keys, writing from the heart, and getting your friends to confide in you so you can write revealing songs about them.

Still no direct artist page, but for now you can find Terry on the web at ReverbNation, and you can buy the CD we're talking about, the self-titled Radigan, at Amazon.

Here's another article, given attention by ASCAP in their daily brief, on the whole vexing issue of copyright protection, and by extension, piracy. Because ASCAP is promoting this article in their brief, I can only assume that I'm being asked to take it seriously. And perhaps the article's author, Willem H. Buiter, makes some good points along the way. But some of his points, and in fact one of the big, particularly "scary" points he makes, is patently ludicrous.

Google Street View, an addition to Google Maps provides panorama images visible from street level in cities around the world. The cameras record details of residents’ lives, including pictures of drunk people throwing up, people in intimate clinches with persons with whom they are not officially affiliated, small children playing in a yard, with or without adult supervision, etc. etc. A wonderful database for voyeurs, peeping toms and would-be child molesters.

Voyeurs, peeping toms and would-be child molesters? Seriously? I've used Google Maps street view. It's kind of fun. I look at a view of my parents' street in Missoula, Montana, when I'm feeling nostalgic sometimes. If you're a voyeur, or a peeping tom, or a child molester, I encourage you to use Google Maps street view. Because the odds of you finding what turns you on are so remote, you'll be safely at your computer screen futilely searching for some eye candy, and safely away from the general public. Not only are the photos updated at a very slow rate, they are minutes, maybe even hours, old.

The fact that Buiter gives this point such serious weight makes everything else in his article questionable. To bring in a crazy witness to the defense of a legal battle? Not gonna help. It makes your argument sound as crazy as one of the comments left by one Mr. Buiter's readers that takes an equally unhinged position supporting the abolition of all intellectual property rights.

The online landscape for copyright owners is indeed troubling and undeniably shifting, and ASCAP has a vested interest in protecting its members and bolstering the case for intellectual property rights. But sending out a link to an article with such patently ridiculous material does nothing to promote the cause.

A hat tip to Mr. Gordon Smith, who is responsible for May's songwriting challenge:

Also, if you are instrumentally challenged, I've made a basic piano version of the chord progression, at 2 different tempos. Recorded with my non-keyboard playing fingers, it's not a master work, but it will allow you to try out different melodies over the top of a chord pattern. I can't post links to them here without them being sent out as a podcast, but all supplemental audio for this and future songwriting challenges will be kept on this page.

Have fun, and keep on writing.

Sometimes I think Terry Christopher has more energy in his little finger than I can muster in my whole body.

Recently, Mr. Christopher (in all of his spare time) put together a CD project, called United for the Ride, which will benefit the 2009 Braking the Cycle bicycle ride from Boston to New York City and the sponsor of said ride, the New York City LGBT Center. He approached all the artists, coordinated the mastering process--hell, he even did some design work on the website.

And in honor of him and his heroic effort, I'm putting out this additional project call. In anticipation of the 2010 edition of the United For the Ride effort, write a song that could be considered for the project.

 It doesn't have to deal directly with HIV or AIDS (though it could), but something "uplifting" or "hopeful" or "I will survive-ish" or...you get the idea.  You'd have to be willing to donate the proceeds of the sale of the song to Braking the Cycle/LGBT Center of New York to be on the CD.

In his own words, here's how Terry describes the songs he's looking for:

I just wanted to reiterate that the message of the songs is so very vital. If you can start with Hope and Perseverance as the main anchoring message to your song, that would be awesome. Love, Sense of Self, Determination etc...are also great, positive, hopeful themes in these songs.

There is no "due date" on these songs for now. I'll keep you posted on that front. However, if you'd like to get an early jump on it, and would like more info, you can get in touch with Terry here.

Now, this seems a little unreasonable to me. Google is a search engine. One of the beauties of it is that you can search for almost anything. And once you start censoring the content of search results...I don't know. Seems a little 1984 to me. It's one thing to search for and remove links to illegal sites. It's quite another to just simply filter out any reference to "torrent" or some other method. And the task of filtering out everything gets bigger the more you think about it. First you filter out "torrent." Then what? You filter out the name of the film? Or filter out any reference to any film title with the word "torrent" immediately following it? Who keeps track of that database of film titles? And what if they just rename the process to "storm" instead of "torrent?" Are you going to filter out everything with the word "storm" in the title? And songs need to be protected too. Is Google expected to keep a data base of all song titles as well? How does the search engine know the difference between when a word is being used because it's in the language, and when it's being used as a part of a title in a creative work?

I play guitar for a beautiful person who goes by the name of Carene Lydia. You will not find a singer with more heart or soul than Carene, nor a more eclectic song list. And she's doing two sets on Saturday, May 2, starting at 11:30PM, at Mood Restaurant in Kew Gardens. If you're in the area, or even if you're not, come out and give her a listen. You will have a good time and hear the widest variety of songs that you have possibly ever heard. Details, and Carene's bio, are below the fold.

Carene Lydia Lopez will be singing at Mood in Kew Gardens, New York on Saturday, May 2nd at 11:30 p.m. with Morry Campbell accompanying on guitar. After her well-received appearance in November 2008, Carene is thrilled to be performing again for her hometown crowd.

Carene’s eclectic musical tastes began during her childhood. As a very young girl she listened along with her father to folk singers Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, jazz artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole and big band music of the 1940s and 1950s. For a special treat Sundays were devoted to Latin American music: everything from tangos of the 1930s to the plenas, bombas, and danzas of her parents' native Puerto Rico. At her show you will hear blues, folk, pop, and standards that all have one thing in common: “When I sing I want the audience to believe that every word coming out of my mouth is the truth. I try to sing from the heart – the same as my vocal heroes, Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.”

UPDATE: Podcasts will only be available at iTunes for 60 days after they were posted, but they will always be available on the archive page here at this website. Thanks for your patience. All podcasts are now showing up in the iTunes store...and a few things I wish weren't showing up there are also for now available. Live and learn. Apparently any sound file (or pdf, for some reason) shows up at iTunes as a podcast. So right now, at iTunes, you can get a cheesy 12-bar blues progression I posted for reference when talking about the blues, and a pdf file on pornography consumption rates in "red states."  Enjoy, and in the future, I'll find a way to link to those things that does not involve the creation of another "podcast."

iTunes seems to only keep the most recent of my podcasts available. I'm not sure if that's something I can fix or not. I'm researching the issue now. 

But all of the podcasts will continue to remain available here on Songtalk. Just go to the archive link at the top of the left column. Thanks to you, listeners, Songtalk Podcast is starting to draw attention. I'm grateful for your support.

Songtalk Podcast is a production of Perpetrators Undisclosed Music and Songtalk.net. All music clips are the property of the artist, and are used with permission.

I sat down with Terry Radigan in her recording studio in Brooklyn for this edition of Songtalk Podcast. You can listen/download here, or go to iTunes and subscribe by following this link. You can also subscribe to the blog and podcast at the top of the righthand column of this blog.

If you go to terryradigan.com, you will discover that Terry does not yet have a website. However, you will also discover that she has such a loyal fan out there somewhere that he saw that she didn't own her domain name, purchased it, and is holding it in perpetuity for her until such time that she needs it. All I can say is, wow. That's loyalty. 

I think one way young songwriters (and this includes me) (and this means songwriters new to the craft, not necessarily young in age) get into trouble is that they try to keep the verse going in the chorus. In other words, the chorus follows the same basic patterns as the verse. One way to mix it up a bit is to simply make the notes of your chorus twice as long as the notes in your verse. i.e. if your verse moves in eighth notes, make your chorus move in quarter notes, or even half notes.

You might also want to make the pitches ascend as you move to your chorus, and make the notes of your chorus hang out in a higher tessitura (musical term for "average pitch range"). This in combination with the longer notes can really make your chorus take off.

The chorus should be the distilled message your song is trying to convey. Simplifying it down (by making the notes longer) is one way to get there.

Hey, y'all,

Just because it's Friday, here's a picture (taken by celebrated photographer Teresa Campbell) of a sunset.  Have a great weekend everyone.

A past songwriting teacher of mine, Tony Coniff, sent me the link to this clip. It's a very basic how-to video on how to write a song. Enjoy.

Discover Magazine has an interesting article on how Google is making us smarter. You can read the full article if you like (as it is an interesting read), but the gist of the article is that our environment is actually a part of our brain. In summarizing the research of philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, he says:

... the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

In other words, an iPhone is more than just an iPhone, it actually becomes an extension of the brain, because the brain assigns certain tasks, such as remembering, for example, the address of a museum or a music venue, to the device.

Hey all,

Presented my new song, Good, last week at my songwriter's event, and got a lot of feedback. I've taken much of that feedback and rewritten the song, and I have a bridge. Well, it has no words, but it has a chord progression and a melody. And now I'm stuck. In the muck. Send a truck. 'Cause I'm out of luck. I don't even know what the bridge is about. Send your creative impulses to:

Morry's Brain
Wherever It's Wandered Off To
Earth
Solar System
Milky Way Galaxy
The Universe  1MT11-476H5--42

Nick Granato writes really good songs. And he's a great singer. And his most recent release is actually called Outside the Lines. And actually, beyond giving a shout-out to Nick, he's only peripherally involved in this post. I'm thinking about Outside the Lines because I'm reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, as if you've been following this blog, you know. And in the chapter called Writing as a Practice, she says, 

In my notebooks I don't bother with the side margin or the one at the top: I fill the whole page. I am writing for myself first and I don't have to stay within my limits, not even margins.

So in my daily journal entries, I've been doing that: writing outside the margins, daring to go outside the lines, as Nick so poetically and musically put it in his song Color Outside the Lines (on the above-mentioned and linked CD). But here's the thing: it's so automatic for me to write within the margins of the notebook that I frequently forget and find myself writing within the little red lines on the side of the page.

I am so indoctrinated into staying "inside the lines" that I have to consciously make the decision to not do it. And no, I don't suppose the content of what I write in that journal is necessarily connected to where on the page it is written. But the symbolism strikes me. By taking a merely physical step outside conformity, is it perhaps possible to make a mental, emotional or spiritual step toward non-conformity as well? I'll let you know.

Happy Tuesday.