Songwriting Against Type

With songwriter Bruce McDermott, a listener can always find something she likes.

Bruce can’t be categorized. With five CDs to his credit, his songs fall into the blues and rock styles readily, but there are also pronounced hints of country and folk.

“I like pretty much all genres,” he told me. “I am basically a singer who enjoys any good melody.”

In fact, his website is divided into five sections: New Blues, CT Country, Folky Stuff, Acoustic & Vocal, and Electronic. Take your pick!

Of those CDS, I own at least two. I pull “Songs Sort of Blue” out when I’m looking for a bluesy antidote to the garbled ramblings in my head. “Fallen Angels: I’m Just A Man,” with its thought-provoking ballad, “Baghdad Highway,” has more of a folk-rock feel.

The gravelly voice and mix of plucked acoustic chords and jamming notes from his electric guitar and keyboard lend themselves to stories about hard luck and heavy spirits. Even the seemingly optimistic “I’m So Lucky, Baby” is really a tongue-in-cheek lament over love lost. “I thank the Lord,” Bruce sings, “you’re gone.” And if there’s any happiness, it’s the listener’s relief that Bruce has sung himself free of a soured relationship.

The guitar he chooses varies, depending on the sound he’s after.

“I usually play a 6 string acoustic Martin D28 or a Taylor nylon, but sometimes you can’t beat an electric for that R&R number,” Bruce says.

His favorite artist is Neil Young, but songwriters he’d emulate cover the spectrum from Cole Porter to Lightning Hopkins.

Come on down to Captain’s Pizza, 8 Bank St., Friday, July 20 from 5-7 p.m. to hear Bruce share his songs and his bad, bluesy self.

fmbmf (folk music by marco frucht)

He’s like a next door neighbor.

He’s like a little brother.

That’s the unassuming, down-to-earth, mischievous kind of guy he is.

The kind of songwriter he is is altogether different.

He is a folk songwriter, guitarist and singer, one part traditional, one part classical (in training) and one part experimental, in the finest sense.

How else to come to terms with a CD title like “soffty fasnfftof” — an acronym for “some old folk for the young folk and some new folk for the old folk”?

You can find his work here, where his favorite, “Frybread,” illustrates his love of family.

In my personal favorite, “Little Things,” he sings of lost love, something we all know a little something about — and how to move forward in spite of it, which none of us knows enough about.

I asked the multiple music prize nominee (once up for two Whalies and a Native American Music Award and now up for an Indian Summer Music Award) who his influences are. He names the usual suspects — Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and lesser known folk like Lauro Nyro and Melanie Safka. Yet, one of the strongest influences is part of his history: the year he spent living on a Navajo reservation “where my life,” he says, “was changed forever.”

He didn’t say how the Navajo changed him. Spiritual wisdom, perhaps? Clever survival instincts? Reverence for the earth and sky? Because that is what comes through in his songs.

Marco joins me at Captain’s Pizza in New London, CT, on June 8 from 5-7 p.m. to share those songs.

Join us. Meet him. He just might change you.

Legends of Folk (and me, born too late)

Dylan, Baez, Havens.

Vietnam, civil rights, Greenwich Village.

I am watching “Legends of Folk: the Village Scene” on PBS.

Born Nov. 8, 1960, the day Kennedy was elected president, I didn’t have hippies for parents, but somehow, from the womb, I heard the call to folk music.

It took me 40-plus years to do more than mimic Baez, Don McLean and Dylan, write my own material and perform it.

Today, I write what passes for folk anthems about love and loss, with the occasional political treatise on contemporary wars thrown in.

The folk tradition defines the medium and the message I choose to embrace.

I may have been born too late to participate in the Greenwich Village scene, but here in New London where writers and singers are encouraged and nurtured, at least some of us are continuing the tradition.

It Ain’t Me, Babe. It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.

But it could be me, later this century, maybe, jamming with fiddlers and guitarists, keeping the legend alive. Singing fellow songwriters’ tunes like Baez sang Dylan, or them singing mine.

I’m not the one you want, babe. I will only let you down.

Raw, straight talk from Dylan. The soothing, melodious voice of Joan.

Who wouldn’t long for such collaboration and cross-pollination again?

Or, reminiscing, try and recreate it?

Midterm: A Songwriter’s Blog

My new handle for this blog will be digginforlyrics.

Questions asked …

This course surprised me. I started out thinking I would blog about website usability, but early on, was given the permission and the inspiration to find my truest voice. It is the voice of a songwriter.

I’ve been asking myself all the “coulda shoulda woulda” questions about taking this blog on the road, the online highway, for a long and illuminating spin. I’m finding I can, and should.

In me, for as long as I can remember, words have always been fighting to get out. Only four years ago, they emerged in song from a still yet reverberating place deep in the darkest, most confused, vulnerable reaches of my self. Remarkably, those inner workings also keep close quarters with some of the happiest places within.

(I haven’t shared those happier lyrics with you yet, but here’s one line from one of my newer songs that says it all: “I love who you are.”)

I’d like to spend more time in those far reaches, exploring what it means to be me — the late-blooming songwriter,  the accomplished yet ever-improving guitarist, the shy singer and reluctant performer. I’d like to blog about what it’s like making connections with fellow songwriters and musicians on stage and in practice, learning the craft, and engaging like minds and souls from the far reaches of the Internet.

I’d like to share my growth and keep growing.

… And beginning to be answered

Answering this call means knowing myself, and knowing what I don’t know.

I have said to my classmate J. through this entire academic program that I didn’t think I could sustain an online presence of my own.

I now feel I want to sustain a songwriting blog. So I have been researching similar blogs, sampling youtube videos, and trying to fathom what it is I have to say that isn’t being said.

There are plenty of blogs about songwriting tips and personal journeys. I don’t know yet what’s good and what’s just blather. But I intend to find out. I have something to say — say in song and in a blog. I want to offer words that issue from the heart, not just the head.

This Undertaking Is No Joke

“Line!”

It’s almost worthy of Monty Python, that exclamation. It’s a running joke with my producer, that he would (and recently did) whisper “Line!” when I seemed to forget the words to my own song while performing.

The remedy? Keep performing. And keep writing — in verse and in a blog worthy of that verse.

The plan

Sharing this personal journey and the many songwriting tips I have learned is a start, but that alone will not set me apart from the pack.

It is the blog of the tuneful toddler written early in this class; the blog of a late bloomer with something to say and an original way of saying it, that will make my voice more original, and possibly gain a following.

Clearly, I don’t want digginforlyrics to be of interest only to lesbians, only to the AARP set (I am 50), only to songwriters. I want to appeal to all ages and identities, and to producers, sound engineers, musicians, and of course, listeners.

What I can share about this path of self-discovery through song is how I will stand out.

Tools and perspective

I recently discovered that a self-styled young music producer was following my tweets. He has  more than 126,000 Twitter followers, and follows almost as many. That was encouraging. But when I followed him and sent a him a short tweet, he began posting risque, almost obscene tweets. So I unfollowed and blocked him.

An unfortunate but useful experience, one that confirms my desire to use Twitter as a tool on this journey to find potential, legitimate readers.

I’d also like to use the audio and video capacity of Word Press, which I will have to use judiciously since it isn’t cheap.

Finally, a critical decision will be how to take my blog from complete anonymity (and obscurity) into the realm of my real identity, using my real name. I want to do so because I have two CDs under my real name.

But my name is my trade: my online identity to date has been primarily as a working journalist. My byline and my songwriting identity are the same. How do I make this work ethically and in a practical sense? Lines have to be drawn between the two. Yet, there may be an opportunity for me to blog about songwriting in my own blog on my company’s online portal. Do I want to do that or keep it separate, personal and all to myself? Because it IS time-consuming to maintain and do right.

This is a question I don’t have an easy answer to and hope you, my classmates and fellow professionals, can help me with.

The Searchable Digginforlyrics Blog

I would like a first page of search results for my blog to turn up meta-descriptions like “say it in song,” “songwriting,” “lesbian lyricist,” and, as I grow and define my niche, “folk artist.” I would like catch-phrases like “late bloomer” and “personal growth” and “voice” to pop up, too. But I don’t want this blog to be so introspective and intent on navel-gazing that it loses the audience it is intended for: songwriters of every stripe from the rappers to the folkies to the rockers and the sea-chantey song-makers, who are practicing their craft and making music that matters.

Songwriting is, after all, apart from my work as a news reporter, my legacy. It is the one gift I can give from the depths of my being, a gift that gives so much back.