Over the weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Backroads Birthday Bash & KDHX Benefit at Focal Point in Maplewood Missouri. While we didn't stay for the entire show and I didn't have a chance to say hello to all of my former colleagues, we did have the opportunity to hear seven songwriters (six local and one regional) and they were a treat. It was great music and as usual, I learned something along the way.
For me, it's always inspiring to see what other songwriters are doing. After seeing Rodney Crowell recently, I went home and wrote the entire first draft of a song (music, lyrics, rhythm) in about ten minutes. And yesterday I landed on a rhythm and chord progression for a song that had been dogging me for months - all because I heard Lyal Strickland (the regional songwriter at Saturday's benefit) play something with a similar style. I was fooling around with the technique and my songwriting partner said "yes! That's exactly what w-w-w-dot [the name of one of our songs] needs!" And she was right.
I've started to teach guitar to a friend's teenager. It's a good opportunity for me to reinforce what I know and to share it with someone else. I think I'm also going to be learning all the things I only half-learned when I was teaching myself to play the guitar, like the notes on the frets in standard tuning, scales and the Nashville Numbering System. So far, the teen seems to like my teaching style. At the end of our second lesson yesterday I gave her a song to learn for next week, which I think is farther faster than she got with the two other guitar teachers who came before me. I think this is going to be a win-win.
By the way, my songwriting partner and I still haven't heard anything back from the Bluebird Cafe, but no worries there. We might not be ready yet and even if we are, for us this is really a year for staying more local and honing the craft, in terms of both the writing itself and performing our songs in front of a live audience.
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