in a parallel universe, I am a rock star

I started writing songs in high school, around the time I got bored with playing video games and became interested in girls.

When I was growing up, my dad played the organ at a lot of weddings, and so we had this huge stack of sheet music sitting next to our piano. Sheet music always fascinated me, because above the piano staff it had these grid things with dots on them, which my dad explained was a notation for guitar players. Back then, I played piano but I didn't play the guitar, so it looked really cool and mysterious to me. And by the time I was fourteen, I had figured out that if I played the chords on the piano that corresponded to the guitar tableture, it sort of sounded like I was playing the song. And that made me realize that songs could be analyzed in terms of a melody over a chord structure, and all I needed to do to write a song was come up with a chord structure I liked and start singing a melody over it that fit.

Of course, it can get way more sophisticated than that, and there are lots of other ways to think about writing music. But it was enough to get me started, and I spent the rest of my high school years writing songs like that. I loved doing it so much that when I went to college, I majored in music composition, where they taught me just enough to screw me up for the rest of my life. I've been trying to recover ever since.

Here are four of my recent recovery attempts:

1 The Trip That You're On
2 Coney Island
3 Nothing You Can Do
4 The Way She Broke My Heart

Enjoy!



On a completely different note... I discovered something interesting following my last blog post. If you are a blogger, and you're looking to get lots of new people looking at your blog, put the word "sex" in the title of your post. Apparently, lots and lots of people do these blog searches of new posts with the word "sex" in them. I suppose mine looked especially enticing to them, because it was followed by the word "addict"...