As a songwriting god, I occasionally encounter a situation where I am invited to write a song on a particular topic. At this point, like may other songwriting gods, I could probably put together an album of them. For instance, there’s “Shlomo the Dreidel Shark”, which I wrote because my friend Jon Waterman invited me to contribute to an album of original holiday music he was putting together. The song didn’t make it onto the album, because Jon was concerned that it cast the Jewish religion in an unflattering light – but hey, I’m Jewish, I get to do that. Or, perhaps, there was the songwriters’ night for which the topic, chosen by the previous month’s audience, was “surrogate mothers for orphaned animals”. I countered with “It’s Not Over Till the Cat Lady Sings”, which, you’ll have to agree, is the only suitable response to that sort of epic lack of judgment on the part of the previous month’s audience. And so forth. Read more »

Today – this very day – twenty years ago, I met my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted. I mean, she wasn’t my wife at the time – that would be weird. But given that I remain, to this day, madly and giddily in love with her, I thought I’d tell you the story. Read more »

Not so many years ago, I was a tender young singer/songwriter with dreams of the big time. This was long before I’d internalized Christine Lavin’s observation that there are literally hundreds of dollars to be made in folk music. Truth be told, it wasn’t the money I was after – it was the adulation of millions of adoring fans, or, well, enough adoring fans to fill a small coffeehouse on a regular basis. Had I known how complicated that is, I would have taken the easy way out and become a brain surgeon. Read more »

I saw Alice Groves perform exactly once. She was the feature at the open mike at the Center for the Arts in Natick, in the old storefront before they moved to the firehouse. She must have been 75 or 80 at the time. And I thought, arrogant little snot that I was, “Aw, that’s cute, Buffie’s mom is the feature tonight.” Read more »

My drummer, David Troen-Krasnow, he don’t say much on stage. (Of course, I don’t give him a microphone, so his opportunities for saying much are limited, but that’s an obstacle I’m sure he could overcome if he set his mind to it.) Privately, however, he’s, well, something of a smartass, which shouldn’t surprise you at all – remember, he and I used to be in a ska band together, and if you can imagine eight people just about as snarky as me, well, you’ll get a sense of how much we accomplished in rehearsals. Read more »

Before the demise of my father ate my life, I was on a songwriting roll. I wrote three really good songs in the first three months of this year, and one of them is called “Bliss”, which is a love song, of sorts, to my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted. Read more »

Not funny, this time. Read more »

When I was young, my mom used to talk to herself. Not in a crazy cat lady way, mind you, but undirected muttering all the same. I don’t remember what she said, but I now recognize that it freaked the hell out of me. And the pitiful thing is, I recognized that it freaked the hell out of me at just about the same time that I recognized that I do the same goddamn thing. Read more »

[Scene: a party of some sort, or other person-dense event. I am standing somewhere unobtrusive, as is my wont. I am accompanied by my Extroverted Alter-Ego (EAE). A Random Extrovert (RE) approaches.] Read more »

One of the things we songwriter folks do is attempt to cause other songwriters to write songs. It’s not enough that we torture ourselves; it seems that we feel a need to torture each other. There’s February Album Writing Month, or the RPM Challenge, or some other form of self-flagellation where you’re supposed to write a certain number of songs in a (preposterously) short amount of time, or things like Song School, where you go to the middle of nowhere and where there’s nothing to do besides write songs (think summer camp, with less short-sheeting of beds and more Milk of Magnesia), or topic albums. Read more »