In an effort to share my journey and build community with other songwriters, l’ll be sharing thoughts about my songwriting process and posting excerpts of my creative writing including lyrics, poems, prose and essayettes that are captured in my little red notebook.
To start the new year my family and I traveled to Puerto Rico where my brother and his family now reside. As night fell in the surfside towns we visited, the music of crickets, birds and frogs, with seemingly perfectly [...]
Tangletown (Demo) by Mark Ippolito Confluence of recent readings (specifically “Feeding Ghosts” by Tessa Hulls; “Survival is a Promise” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs), watching several melancholy films (“Aviici, I’m Tim”, “My Sailor, My Love”), streaming “The Kominsky Method” and a [...]
“We may act like the wind, but we are merely the leaves.” ---source unknown Travel inspires me. After more than forty years of delayed gratification, Alison and I spent the last two weeks touring the desert southwest. Our 2200 mile [...]
When crafting songs, I’ve come to learn they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Some are like ghosts that will haunt you and your role is to pick up the guitar (or instrument of choice) and Ouija board-like [...]
To jumpstart creative writing, I've started experimenting with a technique advocated by songwriters writers like Jeff Tweedy and memoirist extraordinare Suleika Jaouad. Whether exploring Tweedy's "word ladders" or Jaouad's "memoir fragments" the prompt is to create lists of words, be [...]
To kick start song ideas I'll often start with a narrative reflection. I intentionally load the prose with objects, sense imagery, similes and the like. These then provide some of the raw ingredients that eventually get mixed into the final [...]
I appeared on the Toronto-based podcast Song Talk Radio to talk about my song Where Will I Sleep Tonight. The podcast features a songwriter each week to talk about their creative process. It's been a great resource for me for [...]
