Pat Blythe – Beautiful, Mariposa and ONES….

As I sit here ruminating on what should appear on my screen, I listen in silence to clacking on the keyboards and the chirping, binging, ringing and a kind of swishing/chiming sounds of messages coming in on various devices. Colleen and my sister Chrissie are busy standing, or perched on a chair, at my kitchen peninsula working away on their various gadgets and pieces of equipment. I am stretched out in my usual writing position on the couch with the fan keeping things comfortable.

The morning was spent running around the city dealing with the detritus that had accumulated in my backyard. Prepping for an my very first summer BBQ has started and is going to take the better part of the week (the prep that is, not the BBQ itself). Curtains closed against the bright heat of the sun, fans going, air conditioner in place, maybe I can get some writing done…….maybe…….

Pat Blythe – The Stories Behind the Songs Part 4….

It’s a miserable, cold, sodden, rainy, pathetically dreary, rather dismal night. Moisture and freezing temperatures will create your very own skating rink on the sidewalk, front lawn and even the roadway. I look out the window and see everything enveloped in ice. Jane Harbury had very kindly invited me down to her Discoveries series at Tranzac tonight but between prior commitments and the weather, my ass is safely ensconced on the couch writing this. I have one artificial hip…..I don’t need two and I’d prefer to keep any modicum of dignity intact.

JAIMIE VERNON – TAKE ME HOME COUNTRY ROADS

Full disclosure. I don’t do Country music. I’ve never been a fan of those Good Ol’ Boys singing – through their noses, I might add – about dogs and bar fights and pick-up trucks and hurtin’ songs about how a good woman gone done them wrong or some endless road trip of wide open spaces carrying a rack full of guns because: FREEDOM!

JAIMIE VERNON – THE ORIGIN OF SONG

Songwriters are a gifted breed. They’re poets that think in three dimensions. It isn’t enough to be able to put pen to paper and Chaucer their ideas onto papyrus. They have to lift those words from this black and white template and insert them into music from which a melody rises and falls.

Roxanne Tellier – Popping the Top off Covers

Music’s a funny thing; sometimes a song will hide in the grooves of an album, unloved and unwanted, until someone uncovers the gem and makes it their own. A struggling songwriter may dream of the day that a megastar covers their work; in the right hands, a number one hit can make the writer a fortune in publishing.

Roxanne Tellier: The Forgotten Man

Imagine, if you will … writing not one, not two … but literally dozens of top ten hits, for groups as diverse as The Beatles, Solomon Burke,  Edwin Starr, the Rolling Stones, Janis  Joplin and Barbara Lewis. Yeah, that’s lightning, baby …