I’m lucky enough to have some very creative friends. I thought I’d share a few things we’ve worked on together.

Music

En Route to Traverse City

I travel a lot for work, and have started toting my musical apparatus with me. This is an idea laid out in a hotel in Traverse City, Michigan.

Immediately after recording this, I walked outside and watched an entire family flop over their canoe in the lake, scream at each other, and then burst into laughter. It was entirely too cold that day to be canoeing.

Liquid Lunch Theme Song

Almost a month ago my buddy and colleague Matt Davis gave birth to the weekly BlogTalkRadio show “Liquid Lunch.”

This little intro piece is musical collaboration with my brother Drew (you’ll recognize the beat from “Frost/Dixon” just below). Everything you hear is either a mouth or a cup of water.

Frost/Dixon

This is a musical collaboration with my brother Drew we began over Thanksgiving. The lyrics are from the Robert Frost poem “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Hence, the bad joke for a title.

I hope we finish it over the Christmas holiday.

Videos

Below are a few videos I worked on with Daniel Miller, Carter Martin, and Charlie Trotter for CTCE’s brand new (massive) in-branch TV screens. Some of you have seen a couple of these on Twitter.

Doodles

And just for fun, here are a couple of doodles snapped with my iPhone.

I wrote a song yesterday from my hotel room outside of Minneapolis. I think I’ll probably add to it, but here’s a quick-and-dirty little recording I made this morning of what it is right now. Hope you enjoy it:

Notes From a Hotel Room in Minnesota (MP3 download)

Lyrics:

For days upon days
I’ve been dreaming awake
of you calling me up,
and we know just what to say.

But doors have been shut
and the well has run dry
and my cast iron throat
it can’t ask for advice.

We say cheers to the present,
we empty out the glass,
talk about where we’re headed
as we drink down the past

Shawn sat on the plane
and drank ginger ale.
He told me the stories
of how he had failed.

His family was waiting
in Saskatchewan
to start their new lives
in the hot Florida sun.

“I spent years breaking things
that I love the most
and feel cheap when I pray:
‘Father, Son, Holy Ghost.’”

Sit down on the train
and they all look away -
staring down at their coffee
and the newspaper page.

We’re all packaged well
we’re all wrapped up and bound
we all practice distraction
and don’t make a sound

We have our smoke and mirrors
we have our one act plays
we’re all trying to scream
in the quietest way

I’ve been playing guitar for around six years now. Since then, literally every single time I’ve ever been around my grandma (who loves Willie Nelson) and have also been holding a guitar, she’s asked, “Well when are you going to play ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ for me?!”

So for Christmas I made this for her, and thought I’d share. I hope you dig it:

If you’d like to download it, the MP3 is here.

Back in the day, if you couldn’t sing on pitch you probably wouldn’t make it as a professional vocalist. But that was then. Today we live in a future of Poop-Freeze, the Hollywood Cookie Diet, and Auto-Tune.

Since 1997, Auto-Tune has been correcting pitch so musicians no longer have to. The side effect is a vaguely (or less vaguely, depending on the artist) robotic vocal sound (think K-Ci and JoJo’s “All My Life,” or Cher’s “Believe”).

Audio engineering blog Hometracked published a list of 10 great examples of Auto-Tune abuse in pop songs, including:

• Uncle Kracker - Follow Me
  
• Maroon 5 - She Will Be Loved
  
• Rascal Flatts - Life is a Highway

Below is my take, set to some light music, on the issue of Auto-Tune. I hope you enjoy it:

[odeo 17766803]

Last November I had a couple of friends who participated in National Novel Writing Month. Their goal? To write a 175-page (around 50,000 word) novel in 30 days. The idea is to fight creativity’s worst enemy, self-editing:

By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down. (nanowrimo.org)

I wanted to participate, but didn’t care to write a novel. So I made up my own version - National Album Writing Month. The goal was to attack my bent towards self-editing, jump-start my songwriting, and write 9 songs in a month.

Here is one of the songs I wrote last November. It’s about some good friends of mine (the lyrics are here):

I ended up writing 6 songs, so I didn’t quite hit my goal, but it definitely got me back into song-writing (it had been over a year since I’d written) so I’m calling it a win.

I’d love to hear your feedback, and would love even more to hear music from other songwriters who might have stumbled onto this post.