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Fear4/21/2017 Fear of death but afraid to live
Afraid of holding back but too afraid to give Afraid to try but afraid to die with all my dreams inside Afraid to be me for fear of rejection Afraid to be real for fear of connection Afraid to fall, afraid to stand too tall Afraid to fail, afraid of success Fear of sadness, fear of happiness Afraid of the dark, afraid of the light Afraid of the deep, afraid of heights Afraid of always, afraid of never again Afraid of what if, afraid of when Fear of speaking up, fear of having no voice Fear of making decisions, fear of having no choice Afraid of too soon, afraid of taking too long Fear of weakness, fear I'll never be strong What can I say about all this fear? Is there anyone who will hear? Thank God above He will take my fear There is no fear in love
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Obsessing on David Bowie10/28/2015 Just revisiting some of Bowie's music and seriously tripping down memory lane. Bowie is still wildly popular judging from the comments I've received from Facebook friends and Twitter followers and I'm considering doing a mashup (in my day we called it a medley) of his songs. From my research ( I looked on iTunes) and my own informal poll (I asked people on Facebook), I have found that the most favorite songs are " Heroes, Changes, and Fame. All one word titles. Nice. (My personal favorite happens to be Lady Stardust from the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust in case you're wondering.) Another little tidbit I found interesting was that Bowie released three albums and six singles all to very little acclaim. There just might be hope for the rest of us after all. He started to get noticed when the release of his song, Space Oddity coincided with the Apollo 11 launch. He really didn't become the David Bowie we know until he changed his persona to Ziggy Stardust. An amazing songwriter and performer, but shrewd in the theatrical is what it took to catapult him to Fame.
Peace, JT Twelve Things We all need to do more3/14/2015 #1 Be polite.
Say please and thank you and excuse me. It does not matter if you think people deserve respect or not. They do. Give sincere complements and learn to accept them graciously. #2 Cook your own food. Use fresh ingredients and a cookbook. A good knife and a good cutting board can change your life. #3 Plant gardens. Grow some of your own food and plant flowers just because they are beautiful. #4 Play outside. Best with kids and animals, but other adults will do. #5 Do nice things for people. Doing nice things for people you know makes your family life better. Doing nice things for people you don't know is called charity. #6 Build things. Out of wood with your hands and tools. (Learn to use power tools if you don't know how.) Make what you build functional and beautiful. #7 Touch. Hug, shake hands, pat on the back, high five, snuggle. Everyone needs it. It is healing. #8 Sing and dance. You don't need an audience and you don't need a reason. Just do it! #9 Sit still and think. Dream, scheme, plan and pray. #10 Stop and smell the roses…or the coffee. Learn how to make the perfect cup of tea. It takes time and it can't be rushed. The same goes for hot baths. You may actually get to do #9 while you're doing it. #11 Read books. Real ones with pages and covers and spines. Feel them; smell them. Go to the library and feel and smell those books too. #12 Use some vocabulary. Use adverbs and adjectives. Banish the words "thing", "stuff", "weird" and all curse words. (I personally enjoy substituting the words "phooey", "poppycock" and "bullhockey" for other well-known swear words.) You are so smart that you can probably come up with some dictionary worthy words yourself. new video blog coming soon!10/24/2014 Coming soon…my new video blog "Song Obsession," as soon as I figure out how to use a video camera!
Before anyone has a chance to notice6/9/2014 I'm convinced that the key to doing just about anything is not giving up.
I was thinking about something I heard Stevie Nicks say. She was talking about how she wrote "Landslide" while she and Lindsey Buckingham were driving through Colorado probably on the way to a gig or something. They had made their record "Buckingham Nicks" and that hadn't gone anywhere. She was 27 years old. Her parents told her, "You've been doing this for a while. When are you going to go back to school, get a real job? We'll help you pay for school, but you need to think about how long you're going to keep doing this." Lindsey got the call from Fleetwood Mac soon after that. What if she had listened to her parents? What if she had decided, "Well, Lindsey and I aren't really getting along anymore. We had this dream of doing this music thing together, but it's not working out. Maybe I should just split"? There would be no Rhiannon, no Dreams, no Rumours album, no 1978 Year of World Domination of the Airwaves by Fleetwood Mac. There must be untold thousands of super-talented people that work in banks or sell tires at Sears because they gave up before they had success. In Stevie's case it would have been a tragedy for her and for us. I think that is often the case with people who "make it" and people who don't. We love the idea of overnight success, but it just isn't real. If you do a thing long enough, someone is bound to notice. Don't give up before anyone has a chance to notice. Write a song everyday5/3/2014 I've gotten interested in the concept of writing a song every day. 365 days. 365 songs. I suppose that in some Utopian society it might be possible. But I'm struggling with the idea. Yes, you should write a lot. Prime the pump, so to speak. Have lots of ideas floating around. Lot's of material and good starts. I'm in general agreement with that. But, why would I want to take something that is my most favorite thing to do and make work out of it? People who love to bungee jump don't do it every day. It's not their JOB. Besides wouldn't it be boring if you HAD to bungee jump every day? Wouldn't you start to hate it after a while? This is my objection to the Philosophy of Write a Song Everyday. What I really want is to do what I love. Do it often. The goal, therefore, is not to make a job out of what I love to do but to make money doing what I love.
The idea of having thousands of songs to your credit does somehow legitimize what you're doing, but only to creepy bean-counting types who only think in terms of numbers. The more songs you have, the more likely that you might have one that's "a hit". Again, we're getting out of the realm of art and into the realm of creepiness: "We're Only in This For the Money". "Success is everything." Don't get me wrong. I want to be successful. But I don't want to sacrifice my happiness for it. To reference my previous post about Bob Dylan: he has thousands of songs, but how many of them that you want to hear twice? Anyway, I've been hearing this phrase "ten thousand hours" referring to the idea that to becoming an expert in something is just putting in ten thousand hours of practice. I tell my students this: the difference between you and say, Jimmy Page, Taylor Swift, Yo-Yo Ma or whoever is that they've done it a zillion times and you've done it twice. Simplistic, yes, and it flies in the face of our hero worship and desire to idolize people who just seem to "have talent". "That ain't working. Your money for nothing and your chicks for free." How we love the idea that maybe I could just have this hidden talent that could be discovered and I could just fall out of bed one day and be rich and famous! Ten thousand hours, folks. I think that's the key to being good at anything. Put in the time. If you must schedule it, okay, but love doing it in the process. To bob or not to bob4/11/2014 No songwriting blog should be allowed to exist without a tip of the hat to Bob Dylan. Although I'm no Ph.D in Bob Dylan (Some people actually write dissertations on Bob Dylan), he is worthy of first name basis and heretoforth in this post, he will be referred to as Bob.
Ah, to Bob or not to Bob. It's a love/hate sort of thing. Probably the way Bob feels about talking about himself, too. Some people love him, some people hate him. A student of mine told me he saw Bob in concert a few years ago and, "I swear he said nothing but, 'Hey! Yeah! for 45 minutes." I saw Bob in 1988 in Tampa and it was legendary. The sheer body of work is unfathomable. But let's think back to young Bobby just starting out as a folk singer. He didn't fall out of bed a great songwriter. Those hundreds of songs didn't write themselves. He had to start somewhere. Where did he get his songwriting education? From books? From seminars? From college courses on songwriting? Well, from songs themselves. He listened. He studied. He learned every song in the genre he could find. And let's face it, most of the great songwriters of our time learned to write songs this way. Not that I haven't read books and gone to seminars about songwriting. I have. Not that I don't have more to learn on the subject. We should learn all we can, but it's sort of like reading a book about how to make love. A little knowledge is fine, but you're really nowhere unless you're doing it. (Smile) Anyway, many of those that we think of as the "greats" probably never took a course. Did Keith Richard or Paul McCartney or Paul Simon? (I know he taught a class in songwriting, and who better, but I don't know if he ever took one.) Whether people like a song or think it's a hit is subjective. Besides, fear is the death of art. This is what I love about Bob. He just does what he does--fearlessly. I sort of subscribe to this notion: that a song is a song. If people like it, all the better. After all, you gotta make a living. But it is what it is. Whatever I (or Bob or you) write is totally valid. No one can write my song. Whatever I say, I've said and it's ok. Let's face it, Bob rhymed "used to it" with "juiced in it". I may roll my eyes and shake my head when I hear it, but that line is in the number one song on Rolling Stone's Top 500. Think about it. You wrote what critics and fans call the greatest song of the rock 'n roll era. You actually set the bar. And you did it without giving a poop what anyone thinks. God bless you, Bob. The Perfect song...length3/19/2014 An interesting topic came up at the Raleigh chapter of the Nashville Songwriter's Association meeting last month about song length. The comment was made that it would be a good exercise to keep your songs at or below the 3 minute and 40 second mark. It got me thinking about great songs and wondering if they followed this "rule". The first song that came into my head was "Blackbird" by Paul McCartney which I think is the greatest composed song ever for it's simplicity, profundity and beauty. It comes in at 2:18. "Let's Stay Together" by Al Green is top 5 on my list and it's 3:18. A quick look through my iTunes yielded some big surprises: "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell which seems to me to be a very important song is only 2:17! "Eleanor Rigby" 2:08. "Hit the Road, Jack" only 1:58!
I was recently working on a demo for a song a wrote a while back and discovered that its 2 verses, 3 choruses, bridge, and guitar solo only came to 2:35. My husband/producer commented that it hardly seems worth the effort when you consider the trifling amount of time that is. Think about it. I get my studio time for free (Trust me, I have PAID.) but studio time is expensive. Even back in the day, studio time was astronomical considering that bands camped out in a studio in New York, LA or Montserrat with giant bowls of cocaine and humongous bags of weed for months at a time. How did George Martin decide that "Eleanor Rigby", a song that's just over 2 minutes, was worth hiring a string quartet for? He just KNEW. And tell me, what would the world be without "Hit the Road, Jack"? in the beginning2/26/2014 Since the beginning, music has always been a part of my life. My dad was a blues guitarist and by the time I was three my little brain had been infused with the sounds that would steer me toward my destiny as a singer/songwriter and musician. My mother was "interested" in music and "tinkered" with playing the piano and the organ. She is also a naturally talented singer, but would never admit to it. So there I was with my little record player and my Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs record trying to mimic a coloratura soprano voice at age 3 and getting mad because I didn't have the range. My parent's stereo had records lined up against it and the images of those album covers were indelibly burned into my psyche. They are hanging on my wall to this day: The Beatles' Abbey Road, Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix, Let it Bleed from the Rolling Stones, Pearl by Janis Joplin, All Things Must Pass. What 5 year old's favorite song is "Apple Scruffs" by George Harrison? That would be me.
Jill Taylormuses about the vagaries of life and songwriting Archives
April 2017
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