Remember the heyday of Napster? I was working at Jupiter Research at the time – back when new media was the big idea. Most of us thought we were smarter than everyone else and just about all of us were dead wrong. But at the time, there was a strong sense that everything was changing in way that was obviously for the better – the new was overtaking the old. New paradigms, blah, blah… yawn. With Spotify and other streaming […]

I started writing songs at a pretty early age. My first attempt was at age nine. I hadn’t gotten around to practicing my piano lesson for the week. So when it came time for my lesson on that particular week, I thought I’d “wow” my teacher with my remarkable songwriting skills. Ogden Booker – my piano teacher – is old school. He was (and still is) the organist and choir director for a number of churches in Stamford, CT. He […]

A few years ago during a trip to Brussels, I discovered the Musical Instrument Museum. The museum is designed to showcase how pre 20th century instruments sound when played as they were designed to be played. The staff at the museum provides headphones that are location enabled – so that whenever I walked nearby an instrument (or a collection of instruments), I would hear a snippet of music played by that instrument(s). Its a great way to get a feel […]

A high school English teacher once told me that Finnegans Wake – the novel by Irish writer James Joyce – was written in a unique way. The last few paragraphs of the novel were intended to lead back into the first paragraph of the first chapter – as a way to demonstrate the futility of it all I suppose. For some reason, that idea really stuck with me. I thought about that as I was writing the words to “The […]

A few years ago, I became friends with someone who was a world-famous silversmith – someone who is at the pinnacle of his craft. I don’t get to seem him anymore for reasons I’d rather not get into, but I’d found him to be one of the more interesting people I’ve ever met. One of the things that he loves talking about is the act of creation – and he certainly wasn’t limited to talking about HIS art. He loved […]

One of the hardest things about songwriting is to know and accept when the lyrics are just right. I know some songwriters just jot down the very first thing they hear in their head and then that’s the song. (interestingly, some of my friends who take that approach often have brilliant lyrics, and others… well…. less so.) For me, I start with whatever comes to mind, but that ends up being the first of many, many drafts. Most of the […]