Songwriting
Songs are often born from strangely understood, hidden places, with no map in or out. These posts share songwriters’ insights, approaches and stories about their craft.

A Body of Many Bodies Flowing with sonic collaboration along the Rio Grande
In There Must Be Other Names For The River, we ask ourselves about our personal and structural relationships with the drying river that today we call the Rio Grande. In this sound performance, listeners hear the voices of six singers channeling the river. Each singer represents a point where streamflow data have been collected from the 1970s to now and into possible futures.
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No More Excuses 2020 was the year I'd finally record my first album
Being an artist means putting yourself out there. The deeper and more real your expressions are, the more you set yourself up for criticism. Sometimes it’s tough to sift through which criticism to ignore, and which to pay attention to.
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Connecting Between Two Coasts with Iska Dhaaf Sam Miller catches up with Nate and Benjamin via Brooklyn and Seattle
Nate and Ben of Iska Dhaaf chat with Sam Miller about their latest album: “I think writing about dark things is healthy. Our first album had themes about drone warfare and disconnection. The new EP is more about communication and wanting to be close to others, even though we often fall short.”
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Javier Romero Intends to Give a Damn A chat with the force behind Strange Magic about new release Melatonin Doomsday Blues
Strange Magic’s Javier Romero shares his solo project’s evolution, how his new album holds up to pandemic realities, and how he keeps track of hundreds of “mumble jams” to feed his songwriting.
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THE CANCELED SHOWS 5: Jalessa Blackshear, Fast Heart Mart, La Leif, Jack Evan Johnson, I Know Billy
THE CANCELED SHOWS 5 includes footage from a BLM demonstration, sights/sounds from the UK, a Nashville rocker and a banjo-pickin song about an alien recorded in a sewer drain, apparently.
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Five Fantastic Songs With No Lyrics
Singing the words to our favorite song is a way to interact with the art we love, a way to feel like we are part of it… But some songs are so good that we love them even if they have no lyrics. Some songs are able to communicate a full range of human emotion without a single word. Here are five of those songs, and what makes them so iconic.
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‘The Canceled Shows’ on Pyragraph TV Eva Ave shares her favorite quaran-tunes
I made a chatty video featuring music by bands who’ve had to cancel shows or tours cause of COVID19 self-distancing. If you like what you hear, go to their page and support an artist today — buy an album or some tracks!
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Jeremy & The Clones Debut Sun Studio Track Florida musicians debut new song and talk booking tours, their photo shoot and recording at Sun Studio
“It was kind of surreal and didn’t sink in how crazy and legendary the room was when we were there. It almost doesn’t feel like OMG I was in the same room as Elvis and Johnny Cash; there is some kind of vibe in the room that I can’t describe.”
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Dear Rich: Using MIDI Music from a Video Game Cartridge
Dear Rich: I want to know if it is considered sampling when you record sound coming from a synthesizer that is playing electronic note data stored on a memory chip. Technically when you play an NES game (’80s video game system), the music that is playing is not pre-recorded. It is actually played “live” from musical note data on the game cartridge (gameplay triggers a MIDI pattern) in the console into the internal synthesizer.
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Chicharra on Chicharra
I asked all the members of Chicharra, a band I’m in, to come up with three questions for another player. And it’s like they’ve been giving interviews their whole lives. Their curiosity about the nuances of how music is made, how the other people in our band-fam experience practice and performance, was so spot-on. I loved hearing them talk shop.
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Dear Little Bobby: I Wanna Write Rock ‘n’ Roll
You can study music theory until your right brain bleeds but that still does not mean you can write a song, or that the song will be “good.” To start writing, you need to keep playing.
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Dear Rich: My Co-Writer Disappeared. How Do I License Our Song?
It sounds as if you and the composer—like Felice and Boudleaux Bryant—intended to combine words and music into “inseparable or interdependent parts.” That makes you and the composer joint copyright owners of the song.
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Not All Art Scales, Not All Businesses Should
Guest Blogger Maggie Vail: “Musicians are leaders. Music has been at the forefront of every massive cultural movement from civil rights to feminism to anti war movements.”
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3 Things That Make a Performance Unmissable
Over time, our choices start to form a theme, an overarching message to the world about us and what we stand for. I think about it like a motto on a coat of arms, or the mission of an artistic ministry. What does our work stand for?
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What’s Your Deal, Prism Bitch?
Our advice for aspiring musicians and artists: 1) Trust your instincts and find a project where you can put some of that trust in the people you play with. It’s like magic. 2) Hold yourself and your collaborators to the “Don’t be a Dick” Golden Rule. 3) Surround yourself with kind people who inspire you.
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Dear Little Bobby: Too Slow, Manilow?
Our modern civil rights movement needs as many people as possible to be themselves and for us to work together for change. But people “being themselves” also means that they are allowed to not talk about their private life for as long as they do not want to talk about it, maybe even forever.
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