Cary, North Carolina
60 Years Old
Songwriter, Lyricist

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BIOGRAPHY

Hot damn! The wonders of technology. Now anybody can get their stuff out there. Not that I ever had any pretensions of doing that. I wrote for myself—inevitably so, since I can’t sing or play the guitar worth a damn. On the other hand, there was nobody I had to please “or else.” When a song came, it came. If it was “too long,” so what? Same thing if it took a tune 20 years to get finished. The luxury to write whatever you want with no pressure to produce . . . oooh, songwriter heaven.

The down side was writing in a vacuum for 30 years—Japan, of all places. (Hopefully, there’ll be a book coming out before too long about my three-year stint at a Zen monastery in a small fishing town, hanging out with the local yakuza and working as a doorman at a Nagoya cabaret, but that’s another story.) With a day job as an advertising copywriter, I learned to write to client specifications. So I do understand that writing a commercial song means, for the most part or unless you’re Bob Dylan, following rules.

Ten years ago, I began running into some really hot over-50 Japanese musicians who, to different degrees, had fallen on hard times. With specialties ranging from country and rock to classical and bossa nova, we formed a loose project dubbed “The Music Bank.” They contributed their considerable writing and playing talents. I write lyrics and music, but as the only white boy—as in English speaking white boy—by default I became the salesman. So give a listen, drop a line. Looking forward.

Contact

Administrative: Gordon Hutchison

DAY JOB

Advertising copywriter/translator

I AM INTERESTED IN

in co writing in person
in pitching songs to artist
in pitching songs to tv
in getting a publishing deal

experience >

AWARDS & ACCOLADES

Two 2nd place finishes in American Songwriter's lyrics contest.

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Cadillac Sky

Cadillac Sky should be a lot more tired. It’s early Saturday afternoon at MerleFest and the band–Bryan Simpson, Matt Menefree, Andrew Moritz, Ross Holmes and newest addition David Mayfield–has already logged two performances on the day....

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Sessions: David Bazan

It was pretty slow. I mean, I played [the songs] on acoustic guitar for a long time, but I didn’t know how to transfer them to the other format. I didn’t want it to be a solo acoustic record. I wanted there to be bells and whistles and full band arrangements even if I didn’t want it necessarily to be electric guitar rock....

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Sessions: Vetiver

“It’s always slightly confounding to me whenever Vetiver is depicted with the same tropes that people have read off of press sheets,” says Andy Cabic. “The same sort of milestones get mentioned but then no one really digs to find out that there are those other things going on.”

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Behind The Song: “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”

Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell sang, it has been remarked, like lovers, although they weren’t. Similarly, Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, the team behind one of Marvin and Tammi’s most enduring hits, “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” wrote as if under the influence of amatory forces; even if, in the spring of 1968,