A Song About Love

So yeah, I wrote A Song About Love.

It was definitely me wot wrote it. I’m not going to have anybody say otherwise.

Sue me if you want. I’ll see you in court!

The Love Song
Verse 1: Love is a feeling that we can't ignore
It's like a wave that crashes to the shore
It makes our hearts beat faster than before
And it's a feeling that we can't explore

Chorus: Love, love, love
It's a feeling that we can't get enough
It's the reason why we laugh and cry
And it's the reason why we give it a try

Verse 2: Love is a language that we all speak
It's the melody that makes us weak
It's the answer to the questions we seek
And it's the light that guides us when we're bleak

Chorus: Love, love, love
It's a feeling that we can't get enough
It's the reason why we laugh and cry
And it's the reason why we give it a try

Bridge: Love is a mystery we can't solve
It's the passion that we can't control
It's the flame that burns in our souls
And it's the story that we all unfold

Chorus: Love, love, love
It's a feeling that we can't get enough
It's the reason why we laugh and cry
And it's the reason why we give it a try

Outro: Love is the one thing we all need
It's the glue that makes us all succeed
So let's hold on to it tight and never let it leave
Love, love, love, it's all we need.

by D.Fee - Songwriter

The Only Cup Of Coffee

I’m drinking a cup of coffee.

It has been pointed out to me that this is The Only Cup Of Coffee I’ve got.

I might like to have a coffee made by an experienced barista in Venice, served to me in a little plaza, on a beautiful springtime day, with nothing more to worry about than to idly watch the gondoliers glide by.

But this cup of coffee is the one I’ve actually got. And this chilly windy day in Campbeltown, just after 9am on the fourth of May, is the place and time I’m drinking it.

It tastes fine. And it tastes even better when I don’t start wishing it was something else.

*And here is my Fee Comes Fourth song for this month - The Other Way Round. Who knows what it’s about, but it’s the only cup of coffee on offer today. ;)

ChatGPT

In the interests of science, blah, blah, blah, I dived (that’s dived America, NOT “Dove”!!! ) into the wonderful, brave new world of Open AI ChatGPT. Below is the question I asked, followed by the response.

It’s very good.

But I’m still, ahem, around if you need me… and even if you don’t, I’ll be here tomorrow.

Or will I?

Q. Tell me what you know about Home concerts - music gigs in people’s homes.

Home concerts are music gigs that take place in private homes rather than in traditional concert venues. They are typically organized by music fans who want to host an intimate and unique experience for themselves and their friends, family, or community.

Home concerts have become increasingly popular in recent years, in part due to the rise of social media and online platforms that make it easier for hosts and musicians to connect and promote their events. They offer a more personal and interactive experience for both the performers and the audience, as the setting is typically smaller and more relaxed than a traditional concert venue.

Home concerts can take many forms, from acoustic singer-songwriter performances to full-band shows. The musicians are typically paid through donations or a portion of the ticket sales, and the hosts often provide food and drinks for their guests.

Some potential benefits of home concerts include the opportunity for musicians to connect more deeply with their fans and build their audience, as well as the chance for hosts to create a memorable and unique experience for themselves and their guests. However, there are also potential risks and challenges associated with hosting and performing in a private home, such as limited space, noise complaints, and safety concerns.

Overall, home concerts can be a fun and rewarding way to enjoy live music in a more intimate and personalized setting.

Small Circles Of People

An interesting blog here on an end to pop.

"The end of pop and the rise of the long tail and AI brings us back a century. Just like it used to be–small circles of people, not mass markets. But this time with endless choice”

I do think this summarises where we’re at quite plainly.

There are still some songwriters out there who are living in The Loop Of Eternal Promise in which they imagine a future with a hit song (s), a record contract, loadsofmoney!!!, and an interview on The Graham Norton Show.

For the rest of us I truly believe that “Small Circles Of People” are where our music is destined to be played, if we choose to embrace the challenge and find our own small circle.

And this is a good thing not a bad thing.

Firstly it presents us with musical goals that are realistic and achievable.

Secondly, we can be part of something that helps to build community and real life personal connections at a time when that is becoming something which is desperately needed.

The Plumber

We’re waiting for The Plumber
(The “Heating Engineer”)
We’re still waiting for the plumber
(I think he’ll soon be here)
I hope he’ll do some plumbing
(Coz one thing is quite clear)
The boiler isn’t working
(And I hope he’ll soon be here)

We’ve been waiting quite a while
(Since the beginning of the year)
But we haven’t frosted over
(I don’t want you to fear)
For our safety or our comfort
(Coz we’re full of warming cheer)
And by that I don’t mean whisky
(Though feel free to send some here ;-).

And I promise not to give some to the “Heating Engineer”.

The Best Of All Worlds

Last week I watched a live stream of a performance from Nashville. Happens that the fella performing, Aaron English, after a brief email exchange a few years ago, travelled all the way to Kintyre to play at Homesongs here in Campbeltown. He talked about his journey and his experiences in Kintyre during his live online set, and it was great to listen to his incredible music and to reconnect (though we’ve never actually disconnected!)

Here’s Aaron performing in another wonderful cross-continental connection with Ali Gul Pir from Pakistan on a wake-up call collaboration, Sound The Alarm.

These connections are the odd happenings which have become kind of normal now for many people, but which only 30 years ago would have seemed like science fiction (or, as with Live Aid, something that happened only in the lives of “superstars”).

And these are the little images of how local, personal, and intimate experiences can interact with the global, digital, and online world, in a positive way. For all of us.

I’m very much a “have your cake and eat it” kind of person. Even now, though things look dark at times, we can still strive to achieve The Best Of All Worlds. Let’s work, as far as we can, to make that happen. Let’s support each other in doing it.

Because it only takes small steps on our part to help move things in a good direction, even in this crazy, mad world. Just that email. Or that decision. Or that invitation. Or that commitment.

We have choices.

And, no, we can’t do it all. But we can take this one step.

We can do this next bit.

Good luck!

Carlos

I was back at The Gather in Tarbert last night. I even got a cheer when I walked through the door. They were worried that, although there were a few poets and story tellers, there was not going to be any music, until I turned up.

Hey, I’ll take desperate cheers any day of the week!

Anyway, it turns out that I wasn’t the only musician there. Carlos from Chile was in the house. He borrowed my guitar and blew us away with his fantastic playing and passionate singing.

I joked at the start of my final set that my guitar would be dreaming of Carlos that night.

Turns out it was worse than I thought. I woke up this morning to find that the familiar warm curves of Taylor were not lying there beside as would be normal on a Saturday morning.

After a little bit of research I discovered that the little devil has run away with that silver fingered Latin American troubadour!

Honestly, I was really trying to play her better.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to love again.

ps. (Just for the record, no, Carlos didn’t steal my guitar. Parts of this story are made up).

Waking Grok

This black coffee tastes good.

It warms my hands on the outside and my stomach on the inside.

Though it is almost May, the weather here is still un-seasonally cold, and today, instead of the recent blue skies, a translucent grey is hanging over Campbeltown. A short while ago I walked through that veiling mist to the bus stop. My wife is on her way to visit relatives in the Netherlands.

Walking home, I see Grok, the giant who lies across the plateau summit of Beinn Ghuilean. He is shrouded in that same light. Like a bride in waiting, who doesn’t quite feel confident enough to be seen clearly.

I will always love Grok though. I hope someday to wake him from his slumber. In fact, I call my exercise routines Waking Grok. He symbolises to me the primal man inside, who is fighting to get out of my modern 21st Century skin.

There is no desperate reason today for me to move away from my computer, apart from the Siren Light Lure behind the open door of The Refrigerator. No impending need to hunt. Everything to hand.

But Grok keeps me moving. Keeps me healthy. And in truth, keeps me alive. He may be hidden by mist, and deep in slumber, but I am grateful that he exists.

In Order To Nail That Song

I have a song that I sang every morning for a number of months.

After that length of time you might have thought I’d have nailed it down.

It never felt like that.

It never felt like every single aspect of it….the delivery, the emotion, the technique, the honesty, the awareness, the in the moment-ness, the vocal, the guitar work…it really never felt like it ALL came together.

But I hear that some artists do allegedly “nail it’. I hear it even happens to them when an audience is there. I hear that the audience is aware of it too.

And I now suspect that the last thing I needed to do, In Order To Nail That Song, was to let go of the expectation of ever nailing it.

I have a feeling that is where the magic might lie.

A Challenge

So, I’ve been procrastinating.

I’d like to offer A Challenge.

I’m looking for two artists who read this blog, and either live close together, or know each other, or both, to take part in the “Two By Two” idea I mentioned here.

Work together to find two people (it could be yourselves) who would be prepared to host a music gig in their homes. It might take a while. There is no immediate rush, but a commitment would be great.

Myself and my friend Chris Annetts (I haven’t told him i’m writing this yet, but I know he’d be up for it) will travel to play our songs at those homes.

In return, we will do the same here in Kintyre. And you can come and play here.

I know some of you have already been here to play, and have been thinking along these lines anyway.

So let’s make it happen.

Perhaps we can start a trend.

How?

Here is a remarkable personal story from a series called How We Survive. It really puts a lot of things into perspective.

Or it should.

But how easily we forget. How easy to start looking at our own relatively minor issues, and feeling sorry for ourselves.

Why do we do that, in the light of other peoples much harder struggles? And does it help us get anywhere with our own battles?

Clearly not.

Like the remarkable lady in the story, we need to be able to learn to look at the bigger picture. Her summary of how she survived, is actually a good place to start to learn How? to thrive, when we can apply it in the privileged position of not having any life threatening situations to deal with.

Read the story. This advice comes backed by some serious authority.

“You get over your little self, then you get your instinct to work, then you get to connect with other people and then you achieve stuff.”

Alarming Alarm

On Saturday somebody told me that Putin has got submarines surrounding the coastline of Britain.

I was weirdly pleased that the news, whether it is fake, true, partially true, or complete and utter b’lox, didn’t disturb my equilibrium one iota, even though my informer wasn’t somebody who I thought of as being prone to bullshit.

There is nothing I can do to change the situation.

Of course terror can more easily get a hold if we have already experienced bad news that then led to bad experiences. Real life consequences undoubtedly colour our psychology. If I was Ukrainian, I might not be so blase, about what Putin was allegedly doing.

But still, even then… what if there really is nothing I can actually do about it?

Yesterday I got a more immediate shock when my mobile phone gave off an Alarming Alarm. If you’re British you may already have known that the government was going to do a practise “disaster warning” for everybody in the UK who doesn’t have their phone settings changed to prevent it. I don’t watch the news, so I didn’t know, and I hadn’t changed my settings.

I’ve changed them now.

What’s the point of letting other people dictate to us when, what and whom we should be afraid. Personally I’m quite capable of being a scaredy cat thank you very much. But I’m not getting into the habit of letting terror have a hold of me before something has actually happened to get that kind of adrenalin pumping.

And the good news is that there were no periscopes visible in Campbeltown Loch on my regular early morning Submarine Spotting amble.

More Like Ourselves

“Why didn’t they pick me?”

Well, for all sorts of reasons. Personal ones, reasonable ones, unreasonable ones, mood ones, timing ones, not yet time ones.

Maybe even lack of (enough) talent ones.

At the end of the day it simply wasn’t for them. Even though you gave it your very best shot. And it won’t be for most people who come across your “thing”.

But when we don’t get picked, when “they don’'t get me”, I don’t think that should lead us to try and become more like somebody else.

Quite the opposite. We should turn our faces to the wind.

And become More Like Ourselves.

THAT’S the trick

Putting off a nice thing until you’ve done a task.

I do that. It’s a trick that works.

But it still makes the task look like…well, a task.

Now, turning the task into a nice thing.

Well THAT’S the trick.

###intent It happened. And now the tent is up, the intent is to keep going for a week. And then carry on with the Friday’s.

The Intent

The Intention
Is to sleep in a tent tonight.
That’s The Intent.
The tension is palpable.
I always get nervous when I’m going to sleep
Outside
In the dark
On my own.

Do I sound like a scared little boy? Maybe I am one inside.

Partly I just don’t do it enough to become familiar and comfortable. The uncertainty breeds fear. That’s how it works with almost anything that makes us nervous or scared.

So, I have another intention.
To sleep outside in my tent on a Friday
Through the spring and the summer.
Whether in the garden, or out and about in Kintyre.
Get a habit going.

I’ve gotta help the little boy grow up.

And perhaps help the grown man to become a little boy.

Gannets

The Gannets were diving in numbers in Campbeltown Loch first thing this morning. It’s always a beautiful sight. And particularly now, after the avian flu that has devastated seabird populations.

They make quite a splash, even from a small distance, when they are all plunging down, like a flash of white torpedos.

I hope they recover fully.

Funnily enough, last Saturday I was at my Dad’s house in Newark, and we had lunch at a cafe called “Gannets”. Very nice it was too. But Newark is a long way from the sea by British standards. No fish on the menu.

I wonder why it got that name? And does it really matter?

We put a lot of stock on choosing names, but at the end of the day we don’t really judge anything, a person, a cafe, a bird, a band or a building, because of what it is called.

We value them because of what they add to our experience of living in the world.

Ya gotta love a boy named Sue.

Time Enough

Take the square root of infinity
Times by seven oceans of love
Then divide humanity
Add the wings of a dove
Take away sanity
And multiply everything
Everything
EVERYTHING
By the heavens above.

You will find
That there is not enough time
And there never will be
To make sense of it all.

But there is Time Enough

To make a cup of coffee
Kiss your lover
Walk into a storm
Drink from a mountain stream
Be helped by a stranger
Help a stranger
Amaze yourself by breathing every day
Sing a song
Read a book
Make friends with a pigeon
Be a friend to someone
Grieve
Laugh at silly things
Count sheep

And to start making something beautiful…

…that might never be finished.

Homework

Another confession.

I sometimes write a song to avoid doing something else. It’s a great excuse. It’s something creative. It’s the thing I’m good at, if I’m good at anything. There is a definite end product. How could time, for a songwriter, ever be wasted by writing a song?

But of course there are other things, which I find more difficult, and which take me out of my comfort zone. And need to be done. The biggest task I avoid is managing the mountain of creations that have been and gone.

Today I was tempted to write a song, I still am, in order to avoid archiving this very Homesong Blog that you are reading right now.

In my mind it feels like Homework more than Homesong work. But when I did the same task before, I quite enjoyed reading back and categorising my own work. So I"m going to embrace it. And that song will have to wait.

I’m sure I must be the only person who has this issue!?

Only Now

Only Now.

A theme I will constantly return to, if only to remind myself.

Only that thing which you or I are experiencing right at this second. The past has gone. It can’t touch us for good or bad. The memories of the past are just that. They come and they go, but even they are happening NOW, not then. They aren’t “Then”.

It’s the sounds, sights, smells, and sensations we experience now, as we write or read or do whatever we are doing, that really matter.

We can get distracted of course. Lost in thoughts that try to drag us away from the present. But those thoughts are ethereal too, even if they lead to a lot of the suffering we experience. But really, they have no control of us unless we let them.

Maybe sometimes we want to let them, thinking that suffering in our minds is some thing that we have to do. And maybe that is our experience right now, but does it have any value? Do we need to give it value? Does it benefit anyone?

All the time we are being presented with a smorgasbord of experience, laid out right out in front of us. Free of charge. Amazing things to see and hear and smell and feel. Even in a dark room with our eyes closed.

Maybe we choose to turn away from the opportunity. But there is only today in which to experience it. More than that. Only Now.

Why would we miss the opportunity?

Humaning Something

I tried to teach a parrot to sing Happy Birthday To You a few days ago. It was on a trip to an animal park with my Grandchildren.

The parrot was definitely trying. I could recognise 3 or for notes before I left him or her to practise alone.

Later on i was trying to teach a brand new song to family members for a singalong. Turns out that humans aren’t bad parrots either. The family picked things up quicker than the actual parrot.

Perhaps Parrots call the ability to copy sounds Humaning Something.

You just never know, do you?