Deb I love the way you segue: from writing to gourmet chef, and back to writing and now all the way back to songwriting. A Renaisance woman!

There are only eight notes in the scale. Anyone who composes music has me in awe, more than painters or sculptors or even writers. How can you take eight notes and, with all the melodies in the world that are already written, come up with something new? It's operating in a dimension I can only witness from outside it.

Anyone who composes music has me in awe, more than painters or sculptors or even writers.

Likewise. There are few things I love more than performing music, but I can't compose, and the closest I can come to even improvising is making up a harmony line, and I'm not even all that good at that--I do better at executing what's written. So I'm in awe of anyone whose brain has that gear.

Bev, you're asking the wrong person. I can't deconstruct how I make music any better than I can deconstruct how I write words - less, in fact.

There's a story, and in this instance, there's a melody. Looking at those lyrics, had they been written by anyone else, I would probably have assumed a haunting melody line, an Arabian scale or tritones or at least a lot of minor chords. But no - it's rather uptempo (Liese, think Uncle John's Band in rhythm and speed, and the only minor, from the G basic to the E minor, is almost triumphant, definitely not mournful).

I don't know how to not do this stuff. I can't read a note of music - my father refused to have me taught - but I can play and write it.

Need is very freaky stuff.

I don't know how to not do this stuff.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I wasn't actually asking how *you* compose. I was expressing awe that anyone can, and does do this thing that seems like magic to me. Moreso than other art forms.

I think visually, and I can comprehend how to draw, and paint, and sculpt, even if I can't do those things myself. I have written, and I understand what that process feels like. I studied piano for eight years with a bad, incompetent teacher, so that works out to more like, maybe, two years, total, and I've always sung, solo, in duets, trios, sextets, or chorus. I've sung soprano, alto, tenor parts, and I read enough music to know whether to go up or down on the line (see above, bad teacher). I can follow a melody line having heard it once, and I'm fairly good at finding or inventing a harmony or descant line.

But I can't make original music. I can't hear it in my head, I can't make it up, no matter how I try. And I'm in awe of people who can and do.

And I suck at interpretation, so it evens out. If I love a song, I can play it and do it my way and filter it. But I can't sit down and "play it the way Chopin wrote it", or whatever. The technical part of me turns itself off and locks itself up into a box.

In the days when I had full use of my fingers, I played quite a few instruments (most of them patchily), but I was a damned good banjo player. I used to warm up with "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" because it's complex and tricksy and moves around. But it would never have been something I tried to interpret. Listening to it, it soars and dances in my spirit - playing it, it just became notes.

Creativity is weird stuff.

I've got a decent singing voice, but that is my only musical contribution...and even that, I waste trying to imitate Aretha and Janis(wisely in front of the dog)

Heh. But erika, do you knock back Southern Comfort?

No...good thing too.Although to get those sounds, I might take it up.

I wouldn't (take it up, that is), if I were you. My old friend Pigpen (Rod McKernan) taught Janis how to drink that crap, and in the end, it killed him by destroying his liver and helped kill her.

Yeah, it's the sweet liquor that will kill you.