Dear fellow-songwriters-pitching-me-songs-for-Adele-to-sing:
Grammys 2012 – Adele’s Clean Sweep!
Minneapolis Star Tribune – Dan Wilson: Hit Man
Wall Street Journal – Anatomy of A Tear Jerker
Dan Wilson on NPR’s All Things Considered discussing “Someone Like You”
Ant Island
What leads a colony of ants to land in a clump on the surface of a swimming pool? How did they get there? Are they crawling on something, some carcass or object? Or is the island entirely made of ants? Does this happen all the time? Do most of the ants feel like this is just business as usual, going about their daily anty routines on an island made of ants? Do a few of them know that something has gone horribly wrong? Have they tried to explain it to the others? It all seems very metaphorical to me, of course, partly because I’m not an ant. A small city or a suburb floating in a blue sea. Los Angeles, perhaps. Human civilization. Planet Earth.
I showed the strange little island of ants to my friend Craig, who said, “We’ve chased something we wanted so far that we can’t get back.”
The next morning I returned to see if I could scoop the ant island off of the water and throw it into the woods or something, but the island was gone. The surface of the water was dotted with individual ants, floating in space.
(Watch it on Youtube for more details of antennae and legs in the sunshine.)
Dobie Gray Passes Away, Joy of “Drift Away” Remains With Us
Listening to various versions of “Drift Away” this morning and thinking about the late Dobie Gray… remembering Semisonic practicing the song in John Munson’s parents’ basement around 1994… We just learned it from childhood memories, we didn’t refer to the original. Much later I realized how wrong my guitar parts were! In those early days of Semisonic, I was trying to figure out how to write songs that could do for my listeners what “Drift Away” did for me. I remember hearing that song on KOZY radio, 1490 AM in Grand Rapids Minnesota, where my family spent our summers. It would really take me away into another world of music. The best part is that the song’s lyrics describe exactly the experience of listening to it, like a hypnotist speaking in first person. From the verses to the chorus, the song talks about being transported by music, comforted, leaving troubled feelings behind. And Dobie Gray’s voice somehow was soothing and exciting at the same time. What an amazing song and record.
