My mother always packs for my father when they go on vacation. All my life, I’ve found this obnoxious. My father never knows where his clothes are and never decides what he’s going to wear—that is, unless he’s working on cars in the garage. He says that when they first got married, my mother was always so critical of his…   …read more.

I didn’t blog about this course last week. To be honest, I didn’t have much to say. I was deep in the process and not really ready to talk about it. I did complete my assignment, however, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with it. I wasn’t ready to show it to anyone yet, I think. Yes, that’s probably the truth….   …read more.

This week’s lesson was all about the melody of words, the natural arc of the language, stressed and non-stressed syllables, etc. I got my assignment done in the final hour and recorded the quiet vocals with my daughter sleeping in the same room, but at least the idea is captured in it’s current “in progress” state. I couldn’t help thinking…   …read more.

While week #3 focused on number and length of lyric lines, this week focused on rhyming and the varying effects of different kinds of rhymes. It was a bit of a review of my first year of university when I was enrolled in the linguistics program: fricatives, plosives, voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs, etc. I admit that I tuned out…   …read more.

Happy Belated St.Patrick’s Day! As the third week of the free Coursera songwriting course comes to a close, I find myself thinking the words stable and unstable a lot. (I’ve also stared at Pat Pattison enough in these past two weeks that he’s appeared in my dreams a few times, but that’s an unrelated personal instability issue!) We’ve been learning…   …read more.

The other night I had a dream that I was in a speaker shop buying top-of-the-line speakers for my home studio. I tested them out and they delivered crisp and pristine sound. When I got them home, however, there was this intermittent buzz that kept rolling through them. It was like a crackle, or a fuzz, or something that seemed…   …read more.