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.