Stuartrosen asked: Love your “A Song Can Be About Anything” drawing (and loved your recent show at McCabe’s). But (and take this as proof that I read the whole thing, I believe that “Bye Bye Love”, which you credited to Buddy Holly, was actually written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Not worth re-doing the drawing (!) but (maybe) worth mentioning to you.

Whoah you are right! And I learned it from the Secret Sisters who visited me from Alabama to write songs. They schooled me about the Bryants, I never knew they wrote “All I Have to Do Is Dream”, “Bye Bye, Love”, “Love Hurts” and “Wake Up, Little Susie”!

8/15/2009

Yesterday I took Diane
out for coffee and told her
I had four problems:

One, everything takes too
much time

Two, nothing goes as
planned

Three, I want too much

and, Four, I don’t seem to
know how to determine
whether I’ve gotten
what I want or not

.

She said, ” ‘Four’ seems to
be your real problem. “

All I really need to write a song is a room with a piano, a window and not too low of a ceiling. No computer in the room, please. I’ll bring my own guitar and notebook. Some potential collaborators (or, to be fair, their managers) find these requirements unreasonable. I guess rooms with pianos and windows are hard to come by? Anyway, I’ve figured out that those are the ingredients that most likely lead to a good song.

My family’s dogs would always circle and circle the spot they were going to lie down on; they might bring a chewy toy and set it nearby, then they’d circle and circle, until the moment and the spot were just right, and then they’d plop down. Ahhhh, just right.

Sometimes I think my artistic preparation is just a fancy version of that same circling approach.

Whatever your work or joy is, do you have a preparatory circling that you do? And do you have a set of “environmental” requirements, like a room with a window and a piano? And a chewy toy nearby?

(see discussion at http://www.facebook.com/danwilsonmusic/posts/10152881649475301)