(no subject)

Earlimart was really good. They're playing in LA and San Diego this week. There are some MP3s at Epitonic.

(no subject)

For my literary friends: Laura Miller directs us to The Paris Review, which has begun to put its 51 years of author interviews on the web. Nabokov, Calvino, Jameses Thurber and M. Cain, Borges, DeLillo, P.L. Travers, P.G. Wodehouse... about 300 in all. So far they've only got the 1950s online, but they should be caught up by summer.

creative process

Lately I've been setting aside an hour every morning for songwriting, before I do anything else. (Yes, I'm still between jobs.) It's been interesting how the task seems to reshape itself each day. For example, a song fragment I came up with a year or two ago:

1. Last week I sat down with a guitar and wrote enough words for two long verses and a chorus with variations.
2. A couple of days later I recorded the basic structure into Ableton Live, and discovered it was EIGHT MINUTES LONG and kind of dull. So I spent the rest of that hour figuring out how to throw away half of the words I'd written.
3. I had in mind a coda consisting of a lot of four-syllable lines, so today I sat down with a sheet of paper, brainstormed sixty-three phrases in three columns, then cut them apart with scissors, grouped them into themes, and arranged the groups that seemed strongest into the structure I needed.

Tomorrow I'll probably record today's results, and find out what I have to fix next.