Sara Palin is a genius!

I don’t know about you, but I kind of grew up with the impression that it took some brains to be president.  I am just baffled by how things go in this country sometimes.  I don’t understand why so many people supported the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’.  I don’t understand how Bush declared ‘Mission Accomplished’, what like 5 years ago almost?, and we’re still losing lives there.  I don’t understand how we stopped counting votes in the 2000 election and no one complained.  WE STOPPED COUUNTING VOTES.  In a DEMOCRACY.  Which  we claim the need to spread around the world.   You all know these facts.  Now, we are again in an election year and  I don’t know what to think again.

 On the one hand, we have Obama, who to me, seems to say ‘change’ over and over.  I’m still not clear on what that means.  On the other, we have McCain, who during the convention in his biography video stressed that he ‘lived in a box’ which I guess means that he has a superior world view.  In the past week he said the economy was fundamentally sound.  Then we have Palin.  

Apparently the fact that you can read a tele-prompter and speak makes you qualified to be president.  I didn’t get all the praise she got for the convention speech…true, she spoke well.  She read well.  A speech someone else most likely wrote.  People were IMPRESSED by this.  How did we get to this being a great thing? Anyway, it seems like many people are ignoring the fact that she is going to be next in line for president if something happens to McCain.  And she doesn’t even speak in sentences.  And she doesn’t even answer the questions asked.  

Here:   This is a direct excerpt from Katie Couric’s One-On-One interview with Sarah Palin, which aired Wednesday on CBS.

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? … Instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess? 

Gov. Sarah Palin: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the — it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

If McCain wins, this woman will be a 72-year- old heartbeat away from being president of the United States.

And here: A Question Reprised, but the Words Come None Too Easily for Palin

It just amazes me that the polling could even be so close.   Well, there ya go.  I’m gonna go hunt a moose and say I’m a foreign policy expert because NY borders Canada.

Titles

I now have 2 new favorites.  I LOVE them.  No, like really.  I LOVE them.  One I already mentioned, the David Gray-ish one, although I don’t really think it sounds like him anymore, and a new new new one.  It’s going to be called ‘Actress’.  I LOVE it.

Things are moving nicely now.  Here are some titles for the songs:

Sunshine

Come With Me

Actress

Goodbye

Escape

Denver (this one may change when I finish the chorus)

Song for You

Coming Home

The rest you’ll have to wait for because I am.  

So my drummer is coming soon.  I’m happy.  He’s an old friend of mine who I haven’t seen in about 3 years and I ran into him on the street about 3 weeks ago walking his dog.  His name is Grey LeGere and we used to play in an acoustic trio about 7 years ago with our friend Jim McArdle.  We all sang and Grey played percussion.  Since then he’s toured with all sorts of different people and is getting ready to do a stint with a band from Peru.  He’s a real good guy and a great drummer and I can’t wait to see what he can add to the songs.

short today.  Til next time

peace

mike

 

ps Happy Bday to Marcia my lil sis!!

Writing on the Road

It’s getting good now.  I am in the final stages of recording.  Adding parts, finishing the arrangements and hopefully coming up with some lyrics.  I have a drummer coming next week and that is really the last piece missing before I go back and tighten everything up and sing final vocal passes and go into the mixing phase.

Thinking back on how some songs come about, I’ve been trying to figure out how this album matches the other ones. With ‘Reach’ I was playing about half the songs on the road before they even had lyrics.  The music was all done and I had a sense of the melodies so this was fun and the crowds didn’t notice because they had never heard them before.  I think it paid off because I had a really good sense of how the songs went before I ever started recording.  This past fall we were still on the road and I had some GREAT guys playing with me.  I started putting things in the set list like “new song 1 6/8 in E” and we’d play it.  They really didn’t know what was going on and I yelled out chord changes and off we went.  There are probably 4-5 new songs that still are making the cut that started that way.

I have also written a whole bunch just sitting on my couch.  I’ve noticed that the ones we played on the road stayed mostly the same and the newer ones, or the ones NOT played out have changed the most.  I make little mixes and listen to the rough tracks in my car or on my I-pod over and over.  Usually this gets pretty annoying.  But it lets me know which ones I get sick of or just aren’t going anywhere. Others I change melodies or arrangements on.  It’s the method I have to substitute for the whole ‘4 guys in a room playing at once’ scenario and it helps me ‘live’ in the songs.  Another thing that is important to me in the writing process is to let go of the fact that these are MY songs.  I try to get to a place where I hear them as preexisting songs so I ‘know’ how they go.

I have one brand new one that I wrote about 2 weeks ago.  It reminds me a little of David Gray.  I love it.  I thought I was done and I came up with a little riff on the acoustic and everything fell into place that night.I had a quick demo done for my trip to Colorado and I would wake up in the morning and sit on my balcony, look out at Pikes Peak in the sunshine and listen to it.  It sounds the way you feel when you look at something like that.  When I listen to it, actually it’s on right now, I truly can’t think of it as anything but what it is.  It came out pretty much done.  And it sounds like it sounds.  It just is.  Nice when that happens.

So after the drummer lays down his tracks, demos will be posted like crazy because I’ll be done with 90% of what I need to put them out there.  I hope you will like what you hear.

peace

mike

Ahhh-Colorado

Just got back from a weekend in Colorado where I’ve never been before.  Stayed in Colorado Springs. Hotel room looked smack into Garden of the Gods. That’s the picture below.  Drove to Denver and Boulder.  Up into Wyoming.  Back through Estes Park and to the entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park.  Back to Boulder.  Huge Mountains to the west no matter where you go and rolling plains to the east.  Got back to NY and had a whole new appreciation for trees and air with oxygen in it.

 

I wrote a song for the last album ‘Mountain Song’ about the Adirondaks here in NY.  You can listen to some of it here:    Mountain Song

Peace