songwriting

Downtown Cobourg there’s a big, historic building called Victoria Hall that serves as a theatre, art gallery, museum, and county court. When I visited Cobourg I took a lot of pictures of it, circling it, crossing the street a few times to get close-ups and panoramic shots. My idiocy attracted the attention of an older gentleman who was heading into his favourite cafe (The Buttermilk Cafe). He asked me why I was photographing an old building, but before I could really explain he launched into a soliloquy about preservation, history, and the “differences between old buildings and old people.” He…    read more.

I started out writing a totally different song. It happens sometimes — you have an idea, it feels like it’s going somewhere, then you get lost in the middle of the second verse and you’re not sure what you’re talking about anymore. As Leonard Cohen says, the thing is that the bad lines take as much effort as the good ones. So what do you do if you wind up in a song full of bad lines? Well, you cannibalize the good ones and write a different song entirely. I had read this “Bonnie & Clyde”-style story about a couple…    read more.