Listening to Cecil a Cecil Taylor record from Japan. The concentration the variation. Listening to what isn’t happening. There are no scales in the ordinary sense being played and yet […]

For an ice breaker I asked each of the new students what person, alive or dead, they would invite over for dinner. Their list included Jesus, Frank Ocean, Einstein, Drake, […]

Couple games I like to play with an eight year old. 1/ how long can you go without complaining? 2/ how long can you go without thinking? I try to […]

New people enroll in the songwriting class. Some write similar sounding letters apologizing for their lack of talent or lack of experience or just go on about lack of everything, […]

In the first meeting of the faculty, today, they said next semester you must put together a panel and someone else said for now just blue sky it. I do […]

Was thinking about next week’s class and how I want to address how music can affect change. Then I thought about asking the students for examples of images that do […]

There was a woman who was a fan of my songs, who out of the blue asked me if she could paint my acoustic guitar, she said she was an […]

It isn’t his primordial relationship to percussion or the salacious lyrics. It isn’t the brilliant simple three inversions in the upper piano register (that pepper the whole song) making every […]

billy joel’s we didn’t start the fire reminds me of people who say all lives matter which reminds me of sam larkin’s stick around and play with you which reminds […]

The idea would be to take a hit song, from years ago or right now, and take apart the elements. Like if it was Let It Be, it would be […]