I’m not a songwriter. I’m a song-makerupper. But I caucus with the songwriters.
Songwriters have notebooks and pens and stuff, sometimes music paper. I have a blank stare and the inability to remember what you just said because I’m tryng to figure out what rhymes with purple*.
All the same they let me play Songwriter Showcases sometimes and I’m playing one on Thursday in Chapel Hill.
This is not a clip art flyer! Those are real umbrellas suspended over a street on wires in Philadelphia, though I did erase the wires and manipulate their sizes. I can’t remember if they’re all from the same photo or different ones, but I took the photo(s). Yay me.
Crashing Into Solution sounds like an activity but is in fact a person, one who writes and sings songs and plays them left-handed on guitar, all of which sounds way better than whatever sound actual crashing into actual solution makes. Jones Bell is also, amazingly, a person — we’ll just be lousy with them Thursday — and also writes and sings songs and I confess I have no idea what that sounds like but several people I trust tell me we’re in for a treat. The show starts at 8, Lapin Bleu is a great bar, and there’s no cover.
* It’s maple surple. That’s what rhymes with purple. Continuing a theme here recently, click that link and check out the guy in the overalls sitting next to Roger Miller. He’s trying to clap on the 1 and 3 and he can’t even get that right. I believe they call that cascading failure in disaster studies.
OK true confession time. I do write stuff down sometimes. Not in notebooks or on cocktail napkins but in the notes app on my phone or a word processing app on my computer.
I always think it’s cool to see the original draft of famous songs. They have a bunch of em at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville and you see them in books or online. It’s been bugging me that the Smithsonian won’t be able to collect that kind of thing from me so I’ve started to use the Track Changes feature in Word. Here’s a little bit of a song I’m working on now.
You might see that in the songwriter exhibit on the Freedom Train at America 350.
Well, not you.
But you can get a 100-year head start by coming to see me at Lapin Bleu Thursday. Say hi if you do. Thanks for reading and listening and coming on out.
Your friend,
The King Teen