Sometimes it feels like writing is like doing free weights at the gym, building muscle, forging fresh neural pathways, jumping from one place to another in my head, learning how to look at the world in a new way, making new connections, learning new strategies, techniques, taming the internal critic while I draw deep from the creative well...

but…

… sometimes it's like the craft needs time to rest, time to settle, to feel comfortable in a safer place, to let ideas sit before they can move to the next level, space to look back with fresh eyes to know more about what I like, what I can do better, time to mature

I sometimes think I’d be the happiest man alive if you left me in a quiet, warm room with some good coffee, a piano and my laptop to write songs every waking moment of every day. But I'm not sure that writing every waking moment of every day would necessarily make me a better writer.

I think getting better is about the journey rather than the destination.

Here's to enjoying the ride,

S.

Geraint has made it to Breakfast TV on the launch of his book <click here>.

I hear he might even star in his own film.

Go geezer go,

S.

Courtesy of Mrs M Hawkins.... another series of bloopers that really did appear in church notices

1.  The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.

2. The sermon this morning will be: "Jesus Walks on the water." The sermon tonight "Searching for Jesus."

3. Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.

4. Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

5.  Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say "Hell" to someone who doesn't
    care much about you.

6.  Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.

7.  Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way again," giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

8.  For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs this evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

9.  Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all they help they can get.

10.  Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.

11.  A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall.  Wind music will follow.

12.  At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What Is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.

13.  Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

14.  Scouts are saving aluminium cans, bottles and other items to be recycled.  Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

15.  Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.

16.  The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and gracious hostility.

17.  Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00pm - prayer and medication to follow.

18.  The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.

19.  This evening at 7pm there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

20.  Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10am. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B.S.
     is done.

21.  The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the Congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast
     next Sunday.

22.  Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7pm. Please use the back door.

23.  The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7pm. The congregation is invited to
     attend this tragedy.

24.  The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new campaign slogan last Sunday: "I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours."

We’ve booked our family holiday. Can’t wait. We’re going to France.

Not our French house because going there would be more work than staying here… job after job after job… We all need a proper holiday so we’ve got a villa a little further south (near Bordeaux) with bags of room, a heated pool, two minutes from the village baker (for breakfast), guaranteed sunshine and no stress. We’ll be driving over (after an overnight ferry) so I need to update my SatNav and bid Herman the German “Auf Wiedersehen” and say “Bonjour” to Veronique Moronique, a French bird who makes even the streets of Bognor Regis sound cool and romantic.

I don’t think it’s sunk in yet that I’ll be able to do absolutely nothing for 14 consecutive days. Except it won’t be like that of course. If I wanted to do nothing for 14 consecutive days we shouldn’t have had children. And then there's the 10 hours each side of the holiday I'll spend driving - or rather balancing speed and the risks associated with mutant French uber-bugs shattering my windscreen. But you know what I mean.

Sandra asked me to leave my Air behind. I’m not so sure about that one. What if I get inspired to rewrite SongTools? Or wake up with a killer melody? We probably won't have internet (30 seconds on my T-Mobile stick in Italy cost me over £40!) but I’m still trying to think of reasons to take it… like I’ve hired 14 great movies to watch. If I could find Grey’s Anatomy Season 5 that would do it. But I'm not sure it even exists. It's not even on US iTunes. So I might need to download some Noddy or Bob the Builder to guarantee its place in the car.

Peace at bath time always works. Anyway, we’re all looking forward to it, which makes me feel like we’re getting good value for money already.

I hope I’ll feel like that when we arrive,

S.

Last night I watched a program on BBC’s iPlayer about Quincy Jones - his life story 1980-2008. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been a massive fan of The Mighty Q. It makes me feel old thinking back… George Benson, The Dude, Patty Austin, James Ingram, Donna Summer, Michael Jackson. Apart from Sandra (who I was dating at the time) I still don’t know anyone in Britain who has even heard of Patty Austin.

It was great to hear some of these people talk about Q and hear some of those classics again and the story behind them - like the story about Michael Jackson singing the lead vocal on “She’s Out Of My Life”. It was also great to hear about a couple of projects that I’ve not yet heard, pulled apart, played along to and charted the production values for.

But listening to the story of Q over the last (nearly) 30 years, a few things struck me –

• His obsession for getting right everything it seems he turned his hand to
• His dedication and passion for all genres of music, from film scores to jazz to pop at the same time as having an incredible knack of hitting the sound of the day (“The Street is where it’s at and if you learn what the Street wants you gonna make a hit”)
• His ability to work easily with everyone from Frank Sinatra and (my all time favourite) Ella Fitzgerald to Michael Jackson, Van Halen and New Order
• The way he built a team of incredible talent around him (Rod Temperton, Bruce Swedien, Steve Lukather ++)
• His ability to capture an amazing performance… and then ask his artist for one more take that’s even better than that
• He’s an alumni of Berklee Music School (YAAAYY!)
• His knowledge of his instrument (the recording studio)
• The fact that he never learnt to drive at the same time as having 7 children with 3 wives (that's a minibus in my book)
  
• That Q’s production of Thriller, the world’s biggest selling album (104 million copies) was recorded in just 8 weeks, with several tracks recorded real time (e.g. ‘The Girl Is Mine). He said there was little time for analysis paralysis. Sounds like it.
  
• That he’s earned 79 grammy nominations, won 27 grammys including a Grammy Legend Award in 1991.

But most of all I know that he would not have got anywhere without setting the bar to a level higher than he can imagine and working as hard as he could to make it over. Sometimes he worked solid for 5 days and nights without sleep until his ears told him it was right.

I'm glad that Q was born when he was... I've got a feeling that given the new music paradigm we find ourselves in his 104 million album sales record is unlikely to be beaten any time soon, if ever. But I'm sure he'd find work if he was starting out today.

Maybe it's another example of excellence + prolific = genius. 27 grammy’s tells me he's got to be there by now.

S.

Poppy said over lunch with Grandma Molly and Grandad today,

“I’ve got a sweet tooth just like Daddy has.”

<then she points to her top-right front tooth>

“It’s this one here.”

S.

On a crowded train the other day a large picture of an investment banker I used to work with flashed across my peripheral vision… it was a newspaper article revealing the identity of a columnist called ‘City Boy’ who had anonymously been unearthing the excesses of the world of investment banking to Londoners for nearly two years before quitting his day job in the City and writing his book about it.

I’m grateful I managed to weave my way through that world without falling down the (so many) moral potholes he so hilariously describes. Much of what he says reminds me of why I had to get out and do something meaningful with my life... the struggles he talks about are exactly why I live on the beach with my beautiful family and write songs with my wonderful cowriters.

If you have the stomach for it, his works are chronicled here <click>. But it’s pretty hardcore stuff…

Although my world still brushes with the City I guess reading his work has renewed my determination to never get so deep into that world that I lose sight of the stuff that’s really important to me. Not that I did before, but the man-traps are still there, armed and lethal.

Thanks for that Geraint, for making me laugh and congrats on your exit at last. I hope City Boy goes to the top of the bestseller list and you get the film.  I also hope they don't come after you now that they finally know who you are.

S.

There can be few things sweeter than little Barts waking up while I’m working late in my home-office, and when I go up to his room to comfort him he simply curls up in my arms and falls asleep with his fragrant hot head nestled under my chin. He’s a dear little chap. We are so thankful for him.

End of parent goo.

S.

The streets of London can be crazy places sometimes. And crazy busy. People can be rude, aggressive, pushy, selfish, smelly (after the smoking ban), slow and downright irritating.

Someone once told me the secret to walking through the crowded streets of London is to:

• Be careful to only look down in front of you - about three paces ahead
• Never look up
• Walk purposefully and very fast
• Enjoy getting to wherever you want to get to five minutes quicker than you ever thought possible.

The idea is that when people see you coming towards them full steam ahead they will know where you are going and take avoiding action.

Now this does involve a huge leap of faith: that other people always look at who is coming at them in time to get out of the way. This would SO NOT WORK in Felpham.

But it does seem to work in London... the last few times I’ve been up to town I’ve stormed the 10 minute walk from station to office and people really did move out of my way like I was a speedboat chopping up the ocean.

What this person giving out essential life skills didn’t notice tho is that it works for a whole load of other things, not just when walking through the crowded streets of London. People might call it the power of positive thinking and other stuff, but for me the ‘streets of London’ theory of how people get out of the way of a determined person totally make sense. At least intuitively.


S.

Had the chance to participate in a City ‘offsite’ last weekend. I thought I’d already had my last City offsite - places where corporate man displays some of his worst behaviours - but this one was a little bit different. Firstly, the City people I work with now are more human than corporate. Secondly, we were discussing (among other things) the future of the recorded music industry.

One of the people we had join us was the marketing director of Ebay who had done a lot of work with Warner Music. Part of his work involved using Darwin’s theories to model the evolution of complex systems in business. It was interesting (despite the obvious red light flashing on my internal dash board at the mention of the ‘D’ word).  After he went through the theory and application of his work in a number of markets we came to discuss the recorded music industry. His views were:

1. All Big-4 music companies were set up to address markets that no longer exist
2. All of the big-4 will find their recorded music businesses disappearing… soon…
3. EMI is not the only Big-4 where large-scale redundancies will be taking place
4. Universal, by gathering such critical mass, is a little more robust than the others (that’s good for BBMP!)
5. The only place artists will earn money in future will be live performances
6. Music publishing businesses will be scaled down to reflect a smaller recorded music industry
   

Now… this is only his view. And the only thing that IS certain is that he will certainly be wrong in some way or another. But some of this does resonate with a number of other commentators I’m hearing.

Does this mean that life for us songwriters is over? No, not at all. But I’ll expand on that in another blog …

S.

While I was in London yesterday a fun new bit of kit arrived for my writing room… an Apple 23 inch cinema display.

I was determined to get one after staying in the home of a real life professional author last summer. He had a mac mini hooked up to a 23 inch widescreen and it changed the whole feel of working... like you were stepping into your writing.

So when I got home at 9.30 last night and this big box was waiting for me I just had to set it up. Mac heads out there know the joy of opening a Mac box and this one was no different. I undid everything, peeled of the clingy plastic film stuff, powered up the monitor, plugged in my Air and of course everything worked like a dream. I thought the display on the Air was good but, man, the cinema display makes it look like a shadow.

Shame I can’t take it everywhere with me.

S.

Gotta tell ya, Barty’s said his first word yesterday:

‘Cake’.

Poppy’s was ‘Pretty’. Monty's was ‘Digger’.

Cake works for Barty - he’s enormous. And I can see my cake gene in his eyes.

S.

Just to let you know there's a new song on my myspace page <click here>. It’s a song I wrote with Sue called ‘Under The Water’ and for both of us it’s a little bit special. I just finished remastering it tonight.

S.

... men shouldn’t wear aftershave. They just shouldn’t.

It went out with snuff and wearing a hose.

S.