Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a guitar across my head

Last night, I told my daughter about a game we could play - she would write the first line of a story, and I would write the next line, and so on and so on. We started with a story about a magic soccer ball, and ended up with a tale of a talking cat and the frightened girl who didn't want to hear talking cats. Pretty interesting what can happen, but it can be frustrating, too. For instance, she kept writing, "and then she woke up and it was a dream," to which I kept writing something to the effect of, "but then she went downstairs and happened again." I ended up winning that one when I finally wrote "but then she went downstairs, it happened again, and it wasn't a dream!"

(She won one when I had the talking cat continue to beg for the girl to open a can, which the girl never ended up doing.)

About 8 PM, I went upstairs to change, since I was still in my work clothes, lay down on the bed in my housecoat, and fell asleep. As a result, I woke up about 5 in the morning. Having two hours to kill, I went downstairs into the basement studio, and finished an instrumental song I had been working on.

Being a songwriter can be a very frustrating exercise. Sometimes you can write a part of a song, and you really like what you came up with -- but then you can't finish it. I have two on the go like that right now.

One is something I wrote on a weekend before Christmas. It is an R&B sort of number, with steel drums and this interesting choral voice thing happening. I had found this program for the computer that lets you compose a song using musical notation, and then you can assign sounds to the melody from the Microsoft GS Synthesizer (yes, your computer has a synthesizer built in to it. Bet you didn't know that!)

I vaguely suspect that this song has to become something more modern than I'm used to doing - my R&B groove is stuck in the seventies with Al Green and Tower of Power.

The other song that I've never finished is a funky song I first began in 1989. It has a great melodic chorus, and a pretty funky organ groove. But I have never been able to write words for it. One of these days, I've got to get that one done.