Finally!
After forty years of false starts, misplaced dreams, inaction and - finally - a damn pandemic, I've made it happen: I've released my first EP of original songs, called TART.
The name comes from a conversation I had with a Nashville songwriting coach, named Debbie Zavitson. Debbie has a long, storied history of working with country songwriters, so when I (most definitely not country) started working with her, I think my sass and attitude kind of took her aback a little. During one session, when we were working on a song together, she said: "I kind of think of you as my little SweeTart: you're all nice and lovely, but your lyrics sure pack a punch!" Which is a great compliment! (At least, I THINK it was a compliment. I'm taking it as a compliment.)
And it's true: all my life, I've been a fan of the weird little ironies that life can throw at us, and they're great songwriting fodder, too. Your online dating profile only attracts scammers? There's a song. You move back to Canada after being abroad for a dozen years, and all the guys who you had crushes on in school suddenly come out of the woodwork, sniffing around for a date? There's a song. You're bopping down the street and the engine of a delivery truck makes you think of a bass line that you'd love to replicate (if only you played bass), and it makes you wonder about the love lives of the night owls who are stumbling home? Definitely a song. Existential crisis after being left entirely on your own during the pandemic (and the months leading up to the pandemic, when you were enduring a mental health crisis)? Hell, yeah - that's definitely a song. True, there'll always be a market for a good love song; let's have good songs about the other things in life, too.
So let's go on a bit of a TART trip, shall we? Over the next few days, I'll reveal how each of the four songs was created, what was behind the songwriting process, and the funnier/weirder bits of this journey of making music.