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The Summer of Off

I did a few gigs earlier this year. Wasn't happy with my performance, although it had its moments. Not gigging means I get rusty - not just at playing, singing, grabbing the right chords, remembering to bring the right cords (so important) for my gear. But also, I was rusty at being human. Live performance isn't ever perfect, and I have to let it go. Be one with the wind and sky. By the time school ended (when you have a kid, school rules your calendar), I had taken a trip to San Francisco (terrible weather), gone backpacking (terrible), sang a choral concert while producing the live recording and video of it (came out really well), and came to believe my life was unmanageable. Too many writing projects, too much ambition, too much time angst. Everything I do, I think I should be doing something else with that time. Meanwhile, my house is a wreck. Too many belongings. So I took the summer off from: writing songs, gigging, writing other stuff, everything. Instead I cleaned ou...
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A big something

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The Roches, a band that has influenced my music to an embarrassing degree, have a song called "Big Nothin'" and it's probably about how they went on a TV show like the old Tonight Show or Saturday Night Live, I really don't know which. It was about getting this big opportunity and finding it to be terribly disappointing, and I thought about it when I went to New York to hear my song sung in this New Works Cabaret thing.  The short version is that Lily Gilan James sang my song at a fancy cabaret space in New York, and she sang it beautifully. Check it out:  It was definitely a big something, and not a bit disappointing. It's hard to process a career opportunity or breakthrough, but I'm gonna try.  There's the question of has it opened doors? But you can't answer that on the morning after. The answer is, maybe. The question is was it successful? The answer is hell yeah. My song was sung by a musical theater professional who I've never met before...
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Back in Baby's Arms

I'm not sure when I threw myself under the bus. I do it a lot so it's hard to remember when I did to myself musically. I was trying to learn how to write for pop, for Nashville (ugh) and it seemed like if it sounded like a show tune, that was bad. Part of the problem was if you have a singer with vibrato, or a song with fancy chords, it bounces out of the ears of music industry folk and becomes unacceptable. Industry people are genre nazis. It's gotta fit into some box, or a box they just dreamed up so they can say the song doesn't fit. It's understandable: industry people are up to their eyeballs in possible songs every minute of the day, and they've got to narrow it down somehow. And vibrato sounds like the person who wrote it grew up belting "There's Got to Be a Morning After" (well, yeah) and that's very uncool. Anyway, when I first just wrote how I write and started letting industry people hear it, I got "it sounds like it could be in...
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First Song

 It's the first song in the show, and it's the first song that's done and recorded.
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It's a big one

 I was in a taxi in Vienna Boy that really sounds braggy but it's okay, nobody reads this blog. Anyway, I was in a taxi in Vienna and I got an idea for a musical. I made cautious inquiries, because when you have a big idea for a song or a play, it seems impossible that it hasn't been written yet. But it seems not to have been done yet. It is a big one. It's inspired by Stephen King and my son's misguided literature teacher and Hadestown and Wicked and a bunch of other things. Í'm excited and overwhelmed and I know two things. 1) I cannot write this thing by myself. Clarification: I could, physically, be able to write this thing by myself. But it's so lonely and awful to write a musical alone, the writing is okay but then weathering the production and the everything, is too hard. I promised. I swore to myself I'd never do it again. So I am putting out feelers and networking and praying and wishing I knew what else to do to find the collaborators.  Finding col...
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I’m working on this song: “Be Mine”

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I wrote it after it was like 80° on Valentine’s Day and I had just met someone in January so I used to introduce the song by saying that it was so unusual for me to have a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day that the entire climate changed. But now that’s not funny.
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X and Y

Sometimes I hate the South. There, I said it. I don't worry about repercussions. Nobody reads this blog.  I've lived in East Tennessee going on 16 years. It's beautiful, it's calm and people are mostly kind. It's not Deep South-y like Alabama. But it's the South. The thing I hate, today, is this relational collision that happens where people are hurt, or offended, or something, and they don't talk about it until somebody blows up. There needs to be a zippy name for this but I haven't the energy to think one up today. There are lots of sociological reasons why the South, or perhaps more rural places in general, are fertile ground for this kind of misunderstanding-based problem. I think it's a tribal fear of conflict, a fear of seeming uncooperative, troublesome, or different, and complete avoidance of the inevitable little irritants that come from doing life with other humans. It's complete, unhealthy denial that relationships can be work. Living ...
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