Tag: production

In 2017, I wrote a song as a response to many of my female friends sharing their "Me Too" stories on social media, in the wake of powerful men in Hollywood and elsewhere behaving abhorrently. The song was called The Countless Few, and I recorded and released it on my Soundcloud page. The emotional content [...]

I’m inviting rap artists to collaborate on a new project. I created these beats for my progressive electro-pop EP, Ace Symmetry. I challenged myself to only use odd time signatures, so every beat is 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, or 13 beats to a bar. If you’re up to the task, I’d love to hear [...]

I released an EP of progressive electro-pop songs in September 2020. Ace Symmetry features odd time signatures, nonsensical lyrics, inventive beats, and catchy synth solos. It was an interesting and fun challenge to work on a focused project like this. I talked about the project and featured some of the songs twice on Song Talk [...]

This year, I’ll have written a holiday song every year for the last six years. Two weeks ago, I had decided not to write one, but finally took a moment to ponder and reflect upon the current state of the world and came up with the title “Silent Christmas.” I wanted to express [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Liar is the third song I've worked on with dance-pop music singer-songwriter Dokter Nomi. I first met Nomi at the Song Talk Meetup group in Toronto. He has a unique approach to songwriting, compared to myself and most of the singer-songwriters I know. Nomi comes up with melodies and lyrics, but doesn't play any instruments. [...]