Writing

Writing tools: the curio book

January 20, 2020January 20, 2020

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

If you want to write—whether prose or poetry or songs, fiction or nonfiction—one great practice you can adopt to fuel your work is keeping what I call a curio book. This could be a small paper notebook or a notepad app on your phone—anything that you have with you wherever you go. Use this book to...

Understanding song form

January 9, 2020January 9, 2020

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Adapted from The Complete Singer-Songwriter (Backbeat Books). Click the cover for more info. Beneath all the nuances of melodies and lyrics, most songs are built from the same basic parts—some kind of sequence of verse, chorus, bridge, and so on. For writing a song, learning to play someone else’s song, or communicating with other musicians,...

Letter from home

September 18, 2019September 26, 2019

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Originally published in Acoustic Guitar magazine, July 1997 Dear Readers, Lila with her uke. It all started innocently enough, in a quiet domestic scene a few nights ago. I was sitting there on the bed trying to iron a few wrinkles out of a guitar arrangement when Lila, my two-year-old daughter, barreled into the room,...

The Mad Hat

July 10, 2019July 10, 2019

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Becoming a writer Grabbing the bright blue Mad hat by the brim, I flip it onto my head as the computer beeps and grinds and finally presents me with the blinking amber command line. I summon WordPerfect and the program’s promise that it’ll help me find just the right language to tell the story. The...

Free Range Acoustic playlist

January 13, 2018February 10, 2018

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

I'm lucky enough to spend my days and nights immersed in music—listening, writing about it, interviewing artists, teaching it, playing it. I just created a Spotify playlist called Free Range Acoustic to share songs that grabbed my ear lately—many from recent albums, but with some older gems in the mix as well. It's a kind...

Chris Thile on being a “serious, curious” musician

November 17, 2017November 17, 2017

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

I think serious, curious musicians owe it to themselves and to the music-loving public to avail themselves of all the tools. You run into a lot of people who are consciously leaving vast swaths of their potential musicianship undeveloped in the name of staying pure. Those kinds of decisions don’t achieve the desired result, because...

David Rawlings on writing songs from tradition

October 24, 2017October 24, 2017

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

[Poor David's Almanack] came out of 20 years of thinking about folk music and the roots of things, and seeing that so much beauty comes out of the fluidity of writing from things that move you. Sometimes I listen to songs that I love and I think, 'Wow, it’s like we’re all standing on the...

Into the here and now

September 7, 2017December 30, 2019

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Through the doorway and into the street, around the corner and past the groaning school bus and down the hill... I walk through the waking neighborhood but actually see very little because of all the clutter in my head—the lead of the article that I need to finish, the prep for my class and the...

Songwriting lesson: how to write a bridge

August 15, 2017August 15, 2017

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Think of the timeless ballad “Something,” from the Beatles’ Abbey Road, in which George Harrison muses on his lover’s allure over a wistful chord progression in the key of C. He sings a verse and loops back for another by way of the song’s signature guitar line, but the second time he lands not on a...

Acoustic Guitar August 2017 Joan Shelley

Joan Shelley on fishing for songs

June 21, 2017June 21, 2017

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

The analogy of fishing has been used before. You’re just trying to be there at the right time, when your brain is in the right state for catching new images, new ways for words to come together. That’s what I think he’s speaking to. If you’re consciously trying to make it fit your form, you’re...

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