A few days ago I got myself a Zoom Q2HD recorder. It’s a good stereo sound recorder with fixed-focus HD video, great for quick ‘n’ dirty live recording.
I cracked it out right away, and recorded a couple of living room videos, one in San Francisco and one in Shell Beach. Here they are. Hope you enjoy them!
I love open mics. I have two favorites in San Francisco that I make every time I’m in town — Hotel Utah on Mondays, and Sacred Grounds on Thursdays. It is in places like Sacred Grounds that the culture begins, where it wells up right from the ground, not manufactured or corporate or in service…
I often have the pleasure of singing at one of Steve Key’s Songwriters At Play showcases. These are held several times a week in San Luis Obispo area. There’s a lot of talent in the county, and Steve books many good traveling acts. These tend to be excellent shows. Brian Jeffrey is one of those…
My new song video, Real Girl, contains many examples of consonance and dissonance, tension and resolution. In my last post, I extracted a phrase from the song and slowed it way down to illustrate how the bass and melody dance, creating and resolving tension in several different ways. Here is the last half of that…
This may have been the most intense art project of my life. Some time early in 2012, I got it into my head to create a stop-motion animation of my song Flying Dream, moving in harmonic space. I’ve spent the past five months working like crazy on it. The song is carefully arranged using the…
There is a passage, in my song Real Girl, that clearly showcases both kinds of dissonance — the kind that comes from harmonic distance, and the kind that comes from reverse polarity. This melodic passage occurs many times in the song, and it contains a rather dizzying series of tensions and resolutions. My friend Jody…
Jody Mulgrew and I are putting together a few shows in the next few months, and for rehearsals, I’ve been recording versions of some of my songs. Jody and I blend like brothers, so the emphasis is on the harmonies. I especially like the way Flying Dream and Breakup Songs came out. That’s me singing…