We are on our way up to Los Angeles tonight, it’s Grammy night and their should be festivities in LA that should be a lot of fun! Speaking of festivities, here is what we have going on: Last week we got some exciting news that we have inked a deal to play Anthology! Anthology is the premier restaurant in San Diego for Jazz, Blues, and all kinds of things….just a wonderful wonderful place: http://anthologysd.com/index.html! So, we will be having our CD release party at Anthology on May 21st, 2012 for the debut of Cathouse Thursday: Walking My Elephant.

We are really excited about the release of “Walking My Elephant”, it’s a great album that we have been working on. It was actually John and my first project some many many years ago, unfortunately it had to be shelved because I was under a record deal contract and couldn’t release it. So finally years later with the help of the Bagley boys, we have finished it up and are very proud of it. It has some wonderful performances on it, things like: the horn section from Brian Setzer’s Orchestra, Rob Kyle did the horn arrangements and well as played the horn, John and I, and a lot of our friends. It’s a really great album that we’ve been really looking forward to getting out! We are very excited to be playing at Anthology as well, the premier spot in San Diego to play! We hope you can all get out and join us for those things on May 21st, 2012.

Also, on March 10th  we have the next upcoming house party where we will be rockin the house. Be sure and go online to Facebook and sign up for Cathouse Thursday’s ‘Til Death Do Us Party: http://www.facebook.com/events/143537489098024/! I better get back to driving now, so you all have a great day, keep the music playing, and I look forward to seeing you guys at one of our events in the near future!

So now another device that has become very useful these days, that has become my home away from home, is my IPad! You all are hip to the IPad! For maybe a couple dollars (3 bucks, 6 bucks, or whatever) you can buy the Garage Band app for the IPad, which is absolutely an amazing amazing device that turns your IPad into a recording studio! Your studio comes complete with guitars, bass, and keyboards that are all playable! I mean they are amazingly playable and sensitive! The first time you play one of these things, it will blow your mind at what you can do with it. But even just for songwriting alone, it’s great for just the simple act of the recording process. So what I love about the IPad app is it has a little window that drops down allowing you to pick out a section. There is a section counter that lets you pull up section A, B, C, or D and then you decide how many bars there are. That’s a wonderful way to go in and just make something simple. The microphone recorder is incredible as well, you can set it down and record a band, yourself on guitar or piano, or even just singing a song. Once again, it’s an amazingly useful device, like the Looper Pedal, only it allows you to manipulate the information. You could even use it to record tracks if you wanted to!

I am reminded by listening to Keith Richard’s book “Life”, and if any of you haven’t read or listened to it, I highly reccomend that you do so. I listen to it on tape while I work out which is wonderful! The Keith Richard’s book “Life”. It has a lot of information about how The Rolling Stones processed their music and recorded. I always respect the Stones because they were always their own producers, unlike the Beatles, they were the ones that were really behind the sound of their music, for good or bad. Certainly for good because they ended up with such amazing things. Keith Richards actually made many of the tracks, of course he was a heroin addict, so he would work on all these things and then completely forget. So if it had not been for all those tape recorders that he carried around with him most of the time, most of the Stones’ songs would have been forgotten, because he would wake up and not remember what he had done.

So, whether your a heroin addict or not (LOL), the IPad is a wonderful device because you can take it everywhere with you. You can multitrack, you can do everything you want to do, but as a songwriter the main thing is it allows you to create these sections. It will let you create a little chordal section that you can then improvise your melodies over so you can build up your song. It will even let you move those sections around if you want to. You could interchange intros with verse pieces and with chorus sections and move them around as you like to get an idea of what the song is, very quickly and inexpensively!

So, I highly reccomend those two devices, the IPad with the Garage Band app (greatest thing known to man), and if you can’t afford one of those right away, a simple Looper Pedal, which simply allows you to record and stop recording creating a loop so you can then sing along and improvise your melodies with that. Alright, that’s our songwriting tip for the day. I hope to see you all soon, thank you very much!

About 12 years ago, I came back from Europe after having a major hit record over there, with my “No Small Comfort” album. We signed a record deal, however that record deal was not such a great thing for me, and it embroiled me in a lawsuit that went on for years and years.

Meantime, my good buddy and I, John DePatie and I recorded an album in LA. We had a great time recording it with some incredible musicians. Mr. Robert Kyle did the horn arrangements as well as played horn himself. We had Brian Setzer’s horn section on the album. We had the strings section that tours with Steely Dan, and just some incredible players.

It was the first record that John and I made together, and the first outing for Cathouse Thursday! Unfortunately, it got shelved for the last twelve years, but it is an incredible album. So, we are finally able to release it, and we are really excited about it! It’s the “Walking My Elephant” CD, and it will be out in about a month!

We will be having a record release party, having a great time with that as well, which we will get up soon. As soon as we have a date down for that, we will let you know. So, lots of exciting things in the New Year!

Also, I want to give a shoutout to Cathryn Beeks at KPRI San Diego for playing us on the Homegrown Hour last week. That was pretty fantastic, we had a great time listening to ourselves on the radio, as you can imagine, and being able to reach out to more of our San Diego friends.

Everything looks good for the New Year, I hope you all will join us! We have a lot of exciting things coming up. Hope to see you here for our upcoming House Parties and especially for the “Walking My Elephant” CD release party! Thanks a lot, and we will see you all here!

First, on the 13th of January we will be down in the Gaslamp at JJ’s, we haven’t played there before but we hear it’s a really great room. We will be there all night, so come on down and hangout with us at JJ’s on the 13th.

Then on the 21st, we have one of our House Parties up here in Encinitas. It’s going to be great! You can sign up for Cathouse Thursday’s House Party on Facebook. John DePatie will be down from LA and Michael Bowman will be opening for us! Michael’s a great young artist, that we are in the process of promoting and producing his first CD! It’s going to be good, we are looking forward to it! So, he will be with us on the 21st, hope you can join us for that.

On the 22nd, we will be at Orfila Winery in Escondido, and that should be a lot of fun. Come and drink some wine and hangout with us in the vineyard.

Then on the 29th, I will be having a songwriting symposium at my house. Any songwriter interested in joining, let us know. The songwriting seminar will be about what we’ve learned about songwriting over the years and how we can help you over some of the humps, so to speak. Hope you can join us for that and all of the above!

So once again, the 13th we will be at JJ’s in the Gaslamp, then the 21st will be the House Party, and the 22nd we will be playing at Orfila Winery, and the 29th is the Songwriting seminar! So hope to see you all in the new year, Happy New Year, and I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! We will see you soon. Thanks, bye.

We will have places for 10 people, and it will be an all day event, going from noon until well into the night. We will cover all aspects of writing songs, at least on some level, obviously a one day seminar couldn’t cover everything, but we will try to hit on salient points. Things like song structure, generating chord patterns to create songs using different styles of music, and also writing with other writers (which will be a big emphasis that we spend working in groups on songs).

We will also be talking about recording demos, also the buisness of music, and what to do with it once you’ve written it. I will try to give you some of my experience, and what you might be able to do with these things afterwards. We will also cover performing your songs (which I think is something often left out in these sorts of seminars). But it is so important, because as a songwriter you need to be able to go in and sell your songs to other people. So, performance of songs will be a big aspect of what we do once we have written some songs. Now if there are some good songs that come out of this seminar, we will certainly offer a recording opportunity here with “Topless Records”, an opportunity to become part of our publishing empire so to speak, for film and television placement!

So we have a lot to do and a lot to cover! We are going to have a lot of fun! There will be a lunch, everyone can bring their own libation, whatever they like, and we will spend the day. Certainly a little wine never hurt the songwriting process and we are just going to have a really fun day hanging out and writing songs. Hope you can join us for that! Thank you very much! Bye.

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What that means is something is in the social unconscious like the song “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Everybody, or at least 90% of the people in the world probably know that song or know the melody of that song. And certain words are as well. Now certainly Cathouse Thursday doesn’t ring a bell in the same way some Beatles song might, but on the other hand, lots and lots of people have seen the movie “The Great Scout In Cathouse Thursday”. When they see that title Cathouse Thursday, they go hmmm, I remember that from somewhere.

The same thing has been done with many other bands. The Beatles for instance, what people don’t realize is that they didn’t come up with the name. The Beatles is the name of the motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando’s movie from the 1950s called, “The Wild Ones”. Another example would be The Rolling Stones, which is from a blues song. Led Zeppelin is talking about the Hindenburg disaster, which they used on the cover of their first album. So, anytime that you are writing or naming a band and are branding something,  you want to also bring in something that people are going to go hmmm I remember that.

Interestingly, there is an artist now calling themselves Roy Rogers and another guy in which I ran into not too long ago is calling himself John Wayne. Richard Burton for instance, which people don’t realize, is that Richard Burton is actually a long running British actor. The Richard Burton that we know, the one married to Elizabeth Taylor, that was not his name at all, he was just the next guy to brand himself with that name. We can tap into these things and use them. Madonna is a perfect example, now there is something tapping into the social unconscious. That’s not her name, but we can see how everyone knows that term as soon as they hear it. It’s not only a term, it brings up an image. The way she used it was obviously not like the term Madonna, her whole image was more easy virtue so to speak, at least in her early albums.

So try to tap into the social unconscious when your writing. I did it in a song on our album “Nashville Baby” called “Funky Hang Loose”. There is also a video for it online that you can check out. But in that song, I basically list all these dances from the 50s, 60s and 70s that we danced to. So every time anybody hears one of those things, they are hearing something that they have heard before and they go hmmm, I heard that, I like it! Anyway, that’s it. Tap into the social unconscious and you can’t go wrong. Go see “Funky Hang Loose”!

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Well, there was a film some years ago that starred Lee Marvin that was called “The Great Scout In Cathouse Thursday”. The character in that movie, I believe it was played by James Bond, was called Cathouse Thursday, because she was born in a cathouse on a Thursday. So the connection that I make with all that, is that jazz was born in a cathouse, not necessarily on a Thursday, but in a cathouse.

The original jazz players, Jelly Roll Morton, who could be called the inventor of jazz, as was Scott Joplin, the great New Orleans composer before him, were all whore house piano players. What a lot of people forget these days, is that whore houses in their day before the 1950s, women didn’t go out. Men went down to the local whore house and went to party and play games, just like the old saloons. That’s how all whore houses worked, they were like mens clubs. So it wasn’t just prostitutes, they would always have a band playing in the corner.

So I kind of relate to the Cathouse Thursday thing. I always imagine in my mind, you know, a bunch of musicians on a slow  Thursday night playing in the corner of the local whore house, basically inventing jazz! So that’s what it kind of means to me. Cathouse Thursday!

Today I want to talk about the best book on songwriting that there is. The book is called “Tune Smith” by Jimmy Webb. Now for those of you who don’t recognize the name Jimmy webb, you will certainly recognize his songs. He’s the most popular and most successful songwriter of all time…believe it or not, beyond the Beatles or any of those people. He wrote songs like “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” and the song that made me want to become a songwriter, which was the song “MacArthur Park”.

Back at about 1968 on the Tonight Show, I heard a man come on named Richard Harris and do this song called “MacArthur Park”, and it was just amazing. It came out about the same time as the Beatles’ “Sargeant Pepper”, and it just blew away everything that had ever been done before. In fact, it is still to this day, the only song that the songwriter, meaning Mr. Jimmy Webb here, to win the Grammys for Best Album, Best Orchestration, and Best Songwriting. So he’s the only one in history to ever win in all those categories for one song. I suggest that every songwriter go back and take a look at that.

By the way, Jimmy webb was only 18 years old when he wrote this! So, the following week on the Tonight Show, they had Jimmy himself come on and sing this song at the piano by himself, and it blew my mind! I had never heard of anything like it before, and the emotion that he brought to the song and the connection that he made to the playing, was something I had never experienced before. I was about 12 years old, and that was the point at which I became a songwriter or wanted to become one and started working towards it every day.

So, I highly recommend this book. It’s quite a thick book, and it covers everything from how to write poetry, to having the right music, and all the rest and everything in between. It’s the best book on songwriting that there is. Ok, so that’s about it. I highly recommend reading it, and I would love to hear your thoughts after you read it. Be sure and get in touch with me online and let me know your thoughts. Jimmy Webb with “Tune Smith”, check it out! Thanks a lot!

I had the experience one of following up a very hot band and the audience was really expecting hip hop music and they just did not relate to what we were doing. I forgot that there’s a whole generation that’s not familiar with blues and jazz and these kinds of things. Their whole lexicon of music in their own minds is very far from what we think of the older rock and roll styles are. When I listen to the music of Hip Hop these days, there’s really nothing new going on that hasn’t been done fore centuries in terms of what’s going on harmonically or melodically. What’s really changed in hip hop is the drums.

We’re in a place now where people need to have a greater and more encyclopedic knowledge of the various styles so that they can become their own. Getting back to the simple ways to extend yourself creatively, you can start to see some incredible songs pour out of you by just using a different instrument. Ideally, it should be an instrument you’re capable with but hardly an expert. By extending yourself this way, you’ll find new ideas and sounds that you can incorporate into your songs.