Totally Guitars

Totally Guitars Podcast

Songwriting was on my mind this morning as I started the News, mostly because of the incredible collaboration on an original song by a part of the TG Community. I hope everybody has seen the evolution of Mark’s noodling in Open G. The piece I played at the beginning was an instrumental I wrote about 8 or 9 years ago and was fortunate to be able to sit down with Al Stewart one morning as he put words to it. I get to a bit more of that story near the end f the News and more will follow next week.

As I missed getting a video out last Friday due to being in New York, There was a lot of stuff to report as far as releases for the last 2 weeks. The Target lessons included a couple Neil Young songs, Unknown Legend and Powderfinger, Jack Johnson’s Banana Pancakes, Scotch And Soda by The Kingston Trio, a Fly On The Wall look at Suzanne with Ed, a couple more episodes of MattF’s mission to surprise his wife with Wild Horses, and Student Reviews on Nick Drake’s River Man and Fleetwood Mac’s Never Going Back Again.

The conversation with Jim Page continued with a few more chapters, ending with us playing a song he wrote about one of the early great musicians in Los Gatos lore, Billy Dean. We also talked about Jim’s move to New York and a bit about The Doobie Brothers and their likely ‘flash in the pan’ status in 1971 or so.

Mentioning Neil Young and Lindsay Buckingham reminded me of a fascinating movie I saw recently, Sound City. It goes into the history of one of the most famous recording studios ever built. You gotta check it out!

As I was running out of time I went a little more into thoughts on the songwriting process and played through a couple Al Stewart progressions. One is pretty well known and one a bit more obscure, I think. I guess this will become a continuing thread over some of the next IGC Updates.

Till then… Stay Tuned & In Touch,

Neil