Where The Meat Is

     Yesterday I was at gathering of musicians and songwriters, a few who I knew, but mostly new faces. At one point, I was on the patio involved in a discussion about the pros and cons of music streaming services. One guy said "Nobody's going to buy an album unless they know they like it. I have to listen to an album all the way through about ten times before that sixth song becomes my favorite, because that's where the meat is."
     That's not the first time I've heard someone talk about artists only putting a couple of good songs on a record and rest just being fluff (or filler). I had someone tell me that when I was in the process of putting out "One More Night In Nashville". He said "Everyone knows that around tracks 7 and 8 is where you put the good songs." I told him that I had every intention of putting eleven (better than) good songs (out of eleven) on my record. He said "Nobody does that."
     Mind you, these were both performing singer/songwriters who have put out recordings of their own music. Either they: (A) have no faith in their own material, (B) don't mind putting out lackluster recordings, (C) have fallen into a trap of doing things the way they think they've always been done, or (D) all of those.
     Granted, I have always been an album cut kind of guy. The seemingly obvious pop hits either eluded me or bored me to tears. Sure, I like the Steppenwolf songs "Born To Be Wild" and "Magic Carpet Ride", but I'd rather listen to "Desperation" or "Your Wall's Too High". The same goes for just about any album of rock or country music that I grew up listening to. I guess I've never been drawn to the least common denominator type of songs. I like to think I'm a more discerning listener than that. Maybe I'm just a closet hipster snob.
     It's no wonder that people aren't buying albums. If they think there are only going to be a couple of good songs on a record, and those songs are going to be buried closer to the end of the album, I don't blame them at all. I would feel like I was ripping people off if I only gave them two (or at maximum, three) songs worth listening to.
     When I write songs, I try to start with an opening line that will make the listener want to hear the next line...and then the next, and the next. I put my records together the same way. Give the listener a first song that makes not listening to the second song a hard thing to do. Repeat as necessary.
     Back when everybody had vinyl albums, a smart producer would make sure that the last song on the first side made the listener want to turn it over and listen to Side 2...and the last song on Side 2 would make the listener want to play the album again. Maybe I'm old-school, or deluded, but I believe that if you produce an album full of top-notch songs, and present them in the proper order, people will listen all the way through...hopefully, more than once.
     So, I would prefer you listen to my whole albums, in the order that I put them together, but really you can start anywhere on them, because that's where the meat is.
     I hope you find it nourishing.

Dreams

        

 

          "You can't campaign with a machine gun."
          I'm not sure what that means, but apparently I said it in a dream one night last week. A couple of nights later, a guy came up to me in another dream and said "You can't campaign with a machine gun. I heard you say that the other day. That was so cool!" It got me to thinking about dreams...mine, and dreams in general.
          I'd be willing to bet that I'm not the only person who dreams about being able to fly. I have had dreams about flying at least since I was eleven or twelve years old, if not earlier that that.  In my dreams, flight is so easy. It's almost like treading water. I wave my hands back and forth in the direction of the ground and I rise right up. Sometimes I fly horizontally and parallel to the ground, but as often as not, the sensation is more like being in deep water (that I can breathe in, and not feel any more than I would feel the air) and moving at will, untethered from the ground. I have them fairly often, and I probably don't have to tell you what a disappointment it is to wake up and not be able to fly.
          I wrote a song one time from a dream I had about being in a wheelchair. Twenty years ago, we were living in eastern North Carolina, in a two-story house with a woodstove for heat. In the winter time, we would get a good fire going right before bedtime and then close the dampers down and go to bed. About an hour or so before it was time for everyone to get up, I would head downstairs and open the dampers, add a few logs, and then go back to bed. The living room would be nice and toasty in the morning. Around this same time period, I was playing music at a lot of biker bars and functions. If you hang around enough bikers, you'll start seeing folks on crutches and in wheelchairs. I guess it's only natural that those images would infiltrate my dreams.
         One night, I had a particularly vivid dream about being in a wheelchair. I was hanging out in a house with a bunch of other "wheelies". Somewhere (not anywhere nearby) there was a guy who had a motorcycle rigged so that he could ride it in spite of the handicap that had kept him chair-bound. We couldn't see him since he was way down the road somewhere, but we were somehow psychically connected to him. We he fired up his bike, we knew it, and we all went nuts. We rolled out into the front yard, hooting and hollering, because not only was he doing it, he was doing it for all of us.
        Then I woke up.
         I was halfway down the stairs to put some wood in the stove when it hit me. I was walking! Just a few minutes earlier, I had been stuck in a chair, but now I was on two feet and walking down a flight of stairs. It shook me up a little. Then I started thinking "What if it was the other way around?" What if I could walk and/or ride a motorcycle in my dreams, but woke up to life in a wheelchair? That day I wrote a song called "Morning Rolls Around". Within a week, I had recorded it with some of my picker buddies, and included it on a cassette that I put out.

          Another kind of dream is the waking one of "What do I want to do with my life?". They are actually aspirations, but we often refer to them as dreams. A dear old friend of mine contacted me the other day wanting to know how to purchase a copy of my "What's Not To Love About That?" CD to give to her elderly country music loving cousins. She told me that she thought "What's Not to Love" was the most beautiful song she'd heard in a long time. "Truly, truly lovely." She added that it made her glad to know that I was living my dream.
          I guess if my dream is to write songs that touch people emotionally, then yes, I'm living my dream. Now, if only I could fly....