Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
Original acoustic music, and lessons for songwriters and guitarists to make their own
Creative nonfiction, Writing
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...
Acoustic Guitar magazine, Behind the Song, Complete Singer-Songwriter, Songwriting process
Brandi Carlile's breakthrough song "The Story," the title track of her 2007 album, sounds intensely personal, even cathartic. Carlile must be singing from raw experience, right? Actually, no. Her bandmate Phil Hanseroth wrote "The Story" before they even started playing together. Since her debut, all of the music appearing under the name Brandi Carlile has...
Acoustic Guitar magazine, Behind the Song, Complete Singer-Songwriter, Interviews, Songwriting process
"Lucky," the sweet, swaying duet written by Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat with Tim Fagan, was originally released on Jason Mraz's 2008 album We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. During an interview for Acoustic Guitar magazine (published in the October 2010 issue), Mraz told me that "Lucky"—like six of the tracks on the We Sing album—originated...
Acoustic Guitar magazine, Behind the Song, Complete Singer-Songwriter, Interviews, Songwriting process
"When the Master Calls the Roll," a brilliant story song from Rosanne Cash's triple-Grammy-winning album The River and the Thread, has a back story that must be a rarity in the annals of songwriting: an artist co-wrote it with her husband and ex-husband. In the case of this song, Cash's collaborators were producer/guitarist John Leventhal...
Lessons and playlists, Writing
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...
Acoustic Guitar magazine, Behind the Song, Interviews, Songwriting process
“Sunny Came Home,” Shawn Colvin’s bright-sounding but lyrically dark song that scored Grammies in 1998 for both Song of the Year and Record of the Year, has a highly unlikely origin story. In 2017, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary release of the album A Few Small Repairs, Colvin shared the recollections below about...
Acoustic Guitar magazine, Interviews, Writing
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...
Acoustic Guitar magazine, Guitar, Interviews, Lessons and playlists, Songwriting, Songwriting process
[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...
Creative nonfiction, Songwriting process, Writing
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...
Acoustic Guitar magazine, Complete Singer-Songwriter, Lessons and playlists, Songwriting
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...
