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New Stuff

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Click here for new song vids I had my knee replaced in February. I thought it would be like, oh, this knee looks bad, let's just put in a new one. It was a little more complicated and a little more painful than that. But I've been feeling kinda mostly myself again, so I've gotten some work done, part of which was getting some songs videoed.It's been a rough year and a half and i've written some sad songs but this one is fun.  One of the rough things was losing one of my college friends, who passed away from cancer a couple of months after my dad died. I never know when I'm going to write a song about someone specific but this one just kinda happened all at once.    and this is kind of an old song but a fun one...   I've spent the last couple of weeks getting some vids of Blesser Heart done so you might want to check out our new website here.  I've also got a couple of sync songs cooking and I might even record some of those sad songs next time I am rec
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Leviathan

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I wrote plays in college and they ended up being produced. None of us knew about dramaturgy, the art of gently prying the script from the playwritght's hands and getting it into production in a way that benefits everyeone. I didn't know how to parse and understand criticism. I didn't know how to separate my powerful emotional wounds and colors from the ways that I needed to write about them.  So it came to pass that when I wrote my third play "All's Fair," I wrote about some personal stuff and I didn't have anyone to talk to me about how I'd written it and how to make it more effective, or anything. Playwriting had been incredibly lonely, even though the world was supportive and my shows seemed to do well.  "All's Fair" kicked me into a serious shame spiral and I had already been struggling with real life and my personal U-Haul of baggage anyway, and that's how I ended up "forgetting" about playwriting. I didn't make a c
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Sometimes You're the Pearl #3: Country Music Karen

Sometimes you're the pearl and sometimes you're the swine. This is another experience with criticism of my work that I wanted to tell you about. I used to send songs to industry people for critique. Sometimes it was not in real time; I'd get an email evaluation. Sometimes it was in "webinar" form, where I'd hear the instructor's voice over some kind of pre-Zoom platform and we could chime in with comments, or be bombarded by the industry person's invaluable insights, if any. I did one of these one time, early in my attempts to become "commercial" and make industry contacts. The facilitator was a music industry publisher person I'll call Karen.  I had written a song, a country song, about running into your ex at the grocery store. I didn't really understand country music, and my song was kind of jokey like a country song from 30 years ago, where country music was able to laugh at itself. Karen heard my song, and she really, really hate
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