As some of you probably recall, I had a couple of hosting gigs in December (Amazing Things open mike) and January (the Nameless Coffeehouse). For some, I think hosting is something that you graduate to – it seems to be a lot like how teachers aspire to be administrators so they don’t have to deal with those goddamn kids anymore. If you’re hosting an open mike, you know you’re going to play two songs, or more, every week, same day, same time. You might get paid a little something to do the night, maybe more than you’d normally find in the hat after a feature (I don’t know anything about the economics of doing this on a regular basis, so I’m guessing here) – for some, probably a good deal. Read more »

A while back, She Who Must Be Taunted and I saw a movie called “Stranger Than Fiction”. Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS auditor without much of a life who turns out to be a character in a book being written by a novelist named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Karen is trying to kill him off, but she’s got writer’s block, so Harold has a bit of time to face his own mortality, during which he frees himself of his bonds, learns to live his dreams, and finds love. Go see this movie – I haven’t ruined it for you at all. And I’m telling you about it for a reason. Read more »

I’m not a fan of the passage of time. It weighs rather heavily on my shoulders, and it frequently presents itself as a topic, in one way or another, for my songs. It’s turned up in “The Millennium Song” and Abbie Hoffman’s Revenge”, and the meandering “Algiers Café”, itself 10 years old now, which contains one of my favorite lines: “Time is the lint in our pockets.” (To this day, I can’t tell you exactly why it means what it means, but it means it nonetheless.) Looking through my catalog, there are fewer of these songs than I’d tend to think, but that’s most likely because the subject looms so large in my mind that I automatically assume that I’ve written about it too often. Read more »

So some of you may have noticed that we just had an election. And so I’ve been thinking more about the nature of politics and songwriting. In my enormous oeuvre, I’ve only written about four songs which could reasonably described as political. Two of those songs, “My Fellow Americans” and “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time”, are “a pox on both your houses” songs – they lampoon the process without really taking sides. Those are pretty harmless, especially if your persona is “everything is fair game”, which is pretty much me. Another, “When the Empire Falls”, has political overtones, but is more of a socio-historical commentary (although I certainly meant it as a fairly vicious indictment). The fourth song, “Trans Canada Two”, was the subject of a previous newsletter – the song is complicated, but pretty angry, and the commentary in the newsletter is still the only commentary I’ve ever sent out which lost me a reader. Read more »

I frequently find myself sorted into the “funny songwriter” bin. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this – some of my songs are funny, and most of them have at least one chuckle in them somewhere. There’s no doubt that I find it far easier to be funny than to be serious. That, in itself, is a characteristic of many funny songwriters, and it’s something which many people seem to find unfathomable. And of course, it’s been previously established that I can’t write love songs. Read more »

I’m a cheat. When I pick my topics, I tend to avoid well-trodden ground like the plague (well, truth be told, the plague really isn’t a particularly common topic, but you know what I mean). For example, here’s the thing about “The Land of Misfit Toys”: I’m pretty sure that no one else has ever written a song about Gumby and Pokey as street thugs. In some sense, once you’ve got a central conceit like that, you’re halfway there. Now, writing about stuff that everybody else writes about, well, there’s the challenge. Read more »

Or, “How I Broke Out Of My Slump In 7 Easy Steps”. Read more »

A couple weeks ago, I was down at Java Jo’s in Milton for Mike Delaney’s CD release party. Some of my correspondents know Mike, he of the typically funny song, host of the JJ’s open mike in JP, all-around good guy. He played most of the set with his band, New England Weather. Mike’s a white-collar guy, a scientist/engineer, sort of like me – we find each other’s work incomprehensible, but such is the nature of specialization. Just before his feature, a young man named Joe got on stage to play a song, and advertise the art that he and his significant other do for a living. And on this Labor Day, it got me thinking. Read more »

As many of you know, I maintain a list of open mikes in the Boston area. Like most acoustic musicians in the area who (a) aren’t genuises and (b) don’t know the CEO of Rounder Records, I’ve spent a good deal of time at open mikes in my performance career, and because of my prominent (har, har) role in the open mike community, I’ve frequently been mistaken for an open mike host, or asked why I don’t host an open mike myself. Read more »