Songwriters' Musings

I like to hear what other songwriters (unpublished and pros alike) have to say about the craft that confronts me with a blank page at times... Here's a couple of internet items to follow that...

First, the Matthew Bennett Band has a Vox blog where Mr. Bennett waxed on as follows:

I am currently in the middle of writing new songs for the band, new songs which in time will hopefully become our first album. Songwriting can be the most frustrating and fulfilling jobs you can think of, something that can take minutes or days to complete, something that can seem impossible or come as naturally as dreaming. A strange job but one of a very few jobs in which you can hopefully create something that no-one ever in the history of mankind has made before, a job that allows you to interact with people all round the world even if it is indirectly and a job that lets you express what you need to express whenever you need to express it.
So to everyone who reads this please take the time to listen to our songs because being a songwriter whose songs are not heard is like being the world’s foremost scientific genius, who has been made to live inside the body of a cat and forced to live with the worlds second most scientific genius whose work is quite immature.

Second, is Steve Earle in yesterday's Globe and Mail (read the article here). He talks about Canadian Singer/Songwriters and his recent move from Nashville to New York (and recent marriage to a girl who has a job).

But what if I did have a heart attack or a stroke? I wanna be in a place, when I get older, where I feel at home. I'm totally okay with being one of these old commies with a walker that I run into between here and the deli in my neighbourhood. I think this place will keep me younger, longer, but I'm totally okay with growing old like that. Washington Square Serenade is a very folky record. I'm living in a neighbourhood that my job was invented in. The only place I can think of that had more to do with the development of the modern singer-songwriter than this four-block area I live in is probably Canada. The idea of the singer-songwriter as mainstream acts stuck, in Canada, in a way that it didn't in the United States. Joni and Neil and people like that. And Lightfoot. There's also Murray McLauchlan, and Ian Tyson, who I have nothing in common with politically, but I still think is one of the greatest songwriters that ever lived.

May the Muse be with us all...