Music

I first met Paul Vos at the Song Talk Meetup, and always dug his approach to writing funky songs with catchy hooks, complex rhythms, and interesting lyrics. Soon afterwards, Paul began collaborating with Sherry Jacoby, another regular member (and now co-host) of the meetup and a fine singer-songwriter in her own right. They recorded several [...]

We completed our first songwriting challenge on Song Talk Radio in early 2020. The team including Phil, Mike, Don, and myself, each shared a song based on the suggestion to write "a positive lyric in a minor key." Mike shared his beautiful acoustic ballad, Rich in Love, and asked us if we wanted to re-mix [...]

On Song Talk Radio, we engaged in our first songwriting challenge. One month, we solicited ideas for a song from our listeners. The next month, we picked one of the ideas as the basis for the hosts to write a song. The following month, we shared our completed songs on the show. https://soundcloud.com/neelmodi/music-and-me The songwriting [...]

This song was the result of a collaboration between Melanie Peterson and I. We wrote the song together fairly easily, and recently recorded it in my home studio. I came up with a chord progression on the piano (I was going through a Dorian phase at the time). Melanie started with singing a melody with [...]

Recently, many of my friends on Facebook were "given the task to choose ten albums that have influenced my taste in music. One album per day for 10 consecutive days. No explanations, no reviews, just album covers." I did my part, because I like to contribute to society and make the world a better [...]

I was privileged to work with singer-songwriter Melanie Peterson on producing a song for her Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. One of Melanie's perk offerings was to write a song for a contributor. Melanie wrote a delicate love song with a healthy melancholy. I'm always impressed at how Melanie employs clever wordplay without sounding clever (the double [...]

My super-inventive composer friend Frank Horvat had a fantastic idea when the COVID-19 pandemic had us all hunkered down at home. He wrote over 30 short compositions for solo instruments or voice and asked musicians everywhere to post a video of them playing his pieces. We even talked to Frank about the singer-songwriter pieces he [...]

I recently finished reading a great book by Marc Myers entitled Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits that Changed Rock, R&B, and Pop. Myers interviewed the people involved in historically significant songs from the 1940s to the 1990s. He ended his examination in 1991 because, as he explains it, you [...]

I first discovered Rush towards the end of high school, after borrowing a tape of Presto from the public library on a whim. I expected to hear heavy metal that I wasn't fond of, but instead I was pleasantly surprised to hear a fusion of rock, jazz, progressive, and extraordinarily well composed and performed music; [...]