Circle of fifths. Jeff helps demystify the concept with the help of a friend and some real live chord progression experiments.

“I’ve often heard about the Circle of Fifths. I studied it many times but it’s always been this abstract concept that I could never really grasp. Last week in a session with Ben Senterfit, the light bulb came on. In the last week I’ve developed scores of progression using it.” (Link)

Greedy. Lee Hazlewood, singer and songwriting legend talks to Harp Magazine about his career.

I loved producing and writing. Releasing records? I only did that for the publishing. And then because of a silly thing that happened with Nancy (Sinatra) I had to start singing. I didn’t want to. But I taught singers what I wanted – with my bad guitar playing and my bad singing. What happened with Nancy came from absolute greed. We put out a new record with her every three months. There were enough hits to go around. But I really wanted to do boy/girl records with her. Now Reprise had plenty of guys. She said “I don’t like them.” She liked me, my old scratched-up whiskey voice. So I told her (adopting a fatherly tone), “OK, we’ll do one with me each album.” That was the start of my gigantic singing career. She knew what she wanted. She’s smart. (Link via LargeHeartedBoy)

On your marks. Get set. Write! Jason of Songpull compiles a list of active songwriting competitions.

It’s the dialogue stupid. Fionn Regan talks about the concept of songwriting:

“Songs are often evidence of some kind of struggle and evidence of some kind of triumph at the end of the struggle. That’s what really makes a songwriter, you are providing people with evidence of the internal dialogue with a conversation that happened and things that happened along the way. I don’t know whether there’s any one glowing thing that inspires me. I’m not sure whether I even like the word. Songwriting is an extension of your character. If you’ve got dirt under your fingernails sing about that, if you don’t sing about that.” (Link)

Musician Gifts (under $100)