Final Thought, June 2013 There are so many changes in the air. On Saturday, June 8th, we performed our final show in Beijing with our fantastic drummer, Zac Courtney. Zac and his family are moving back to Australia and we are on the hunt for a new drummer for our Beijing band. I celebrate this move for his family, but…   …read more.

Towels are a mystery in China. At least, they have been since the first time I was ever here, back in the spring of 2007. I didn’t bring a towel with me in my luggage on that trip. I didn’t even think of it. The en-suite that I had in my (very overpriced) dorm room did not come with any…   …read more.

The big event—the first and main wedding day of three weddings in total—went by so fast that I only remember a few aspects clearly. (That might have to do with not having slept the night before, but that’s just a hunch!) I do recall lots of fanfare—spotlights, loud speakers, an MC with far too much “personality” and lots of awkward…   …read more.

Newsletter Final Thought: May 2013 It’s amazing how sometimes many days go by when I forgot to appreciate how lucky I am. I mean, sometimes I’m exhausted and underslept. Sometimes I fight with my partner and I’m in a bad mood all day. Some months are more scant than others, money-wise, and I have to coach myself out of the…   …read more.

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.