So this is my song-journal-mp3-blog…

It’s brand new!   I’m liking WordPress quite a bit too.  Every week I will have new material on here… a new song by myself or a guest post by another writer.  The whole idea is to give new songs a place to live and talk a bit about their inception.

In true blogger form, on this first post I will let someone else do all the work for me then copy and paste their content…

I just so happened to have a meeting with John Statz

at my place last night so after taking care of business, we set up a few mics and recorded one of John’s new tunes called “Disclaimer”.  I heard the song last week and knew it was an instant favorite.  It’s got a hell of a hook for a melody and a nice groove to it.  Lyrically, the song really spoke to me too; it deals with the emotional trauma that a traveling musician’s relationship endures.

Here’s the track:

And here is John talking a bit about the process of writing “Disclaimer”:

john statz

So I wrote a new song today, and I thought that I would try and take you through the process with me.

Just to set the scene, I was called early this morning to substitute teach (I do this occasionally for extra dough) at Waunakee High School, where I went to school as a teen. I was to teach orchestra that day, but the teacher just wanted me to put in videos and hold study hall, so it was a really easy day. I had a whole hour with no classes, so I sat in the absent teacher’s office with my guitar and began to write a song.

I started with the simple chord progression of G – Am – C – G and played it over and over again until some words began to come out. Lately it is the music that has been coming to me first, and then I decide on a topic and begin to wrap my words around the chords. The song was to be, I decided, a song about jealous, and this is the first overprotective verse that I put down:

“You better tell me where you’ve gone
and when you will be back.
There’s better men out there than me,
and I can’t help those facts.”

Feeling off to a good start, I laid down a second verse that seemed to have little to do lyrically with the first verse, but I really liked the sound of it: click this link to read the full post on John’s blog: http://nothingthattheroad.blogspot.com

John will be playing at the Brink Lounge with Mike Keane and Kris Adams on Dec. 18th