Month: July 2019

For a long time I resisted doing cover songs mainly for two main objections in my mind.

1) I felt it was disrespectful to any previous recording which made me love the song in the first place.
2) I felt like I was snatching some gold fairy dust from another’s work and trying to hijack that for selfish purposes.

So, I went a long time without really trying to enjoy doing covers. If I loved a song of another I always felt it would be more polite and better for me to simply share what they had done with others, especially to the younger generation who otherwise might not ever know the song existed. And by doing this I could feel good about how I didn’t muck it up trying to do it myself, and I might actually help a likely starving artist of yesteryear who probably got raped by his record label and might need the ½ penny of streaming revenue.

But lately I’ve had a change of heart about my doing covers and so I’ve been working on a few. One of the things I’ve grown to love about my doing this is the deconstruction I do in reverse engineering the sounds I love about some old song. For example, I was recently agonizing over “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphy and Larry Cansler and I really had to spend some time listening critically to the song with fresh ears. I had not really paid attention to how the drums are in your face immediately after the haunting piano introduction. I mean they just boom are right there and prominent, and I never really heard that before. The piano introduction gives a subtle haunt, but once the guitar starts the song is at full throttle right from the get go and though I’ve heard the song countless times, my attempting a cover of it now has revealed something new to me about it.

There is a place in my webpage where one can listen to some covers for free, and it is my hope that if a song there catches your ear you will find the original and honor its songwriter/performer by purchasing it.  Or there is a soundcloud playlist of some of my covers there at CLICK HERE.

I was with a friend today for lunch who is a gifted and productive writer, and at one point he said how sometimes for him the hardest part is coming up with a topic. And I got to thinking about my songwriting and how inspiration appears to me and motivates me. Looking back over my 170+ finished songs and the one currently under construction I spent a bit of time in retrospection about it.

What is it exactly that moves me to find a song? What things seem unable to? Etc.

There is no shortage of inspiration in life from all directions, and it is almost hard for me not to find it around me and yet often my receptors are jammed and creative flow may stop for a while. Other times it can’t turn off and I can hardly keep up and/or the output becomes too thin of substance for the rush in getting it down and out before a next idea hits me and infects me.

Some examples are:

Suffering; frequently that can indeed be it with me and so certain ballads are a release of small parts of agony into music or lyrics – like “Drift of Snow”or “Tomorrow”

Joy: Sometimes moments of joy have given themselves to personal inspiration – like “Unwind”.

Humor: This is an infrequent visitor to my musical inspirations, but sometimes I witness something of the ridiculous in others or myself and can’t help but put it into a song – like “Mad as Hell”

Natural Beauty: “I Wish” covers this one both in the beauty of nature and/or the simplicity of time with horses.

Irony: Again this can be cheating towards suffering with personal ironies or disappointments of romance, but it can also be the irony of people wanting one thing and doing everything to prevent it, like “Bobcat Blues” or “Little Squaw”

Mourning: Like “Ebb and Flow”

There are others and I don’t wish to belabor the point, but I appreciated afresh my friend’s comment.