BluesBro's World Downunder

For the last 2 days I have been attending a Pat Pattison Lyric Writing Course along with many well known, many not well known and many soon to be well known songwriters.

Quoting one of the songs that was critiqued this afternoon, it was a 'Leap of Faith' in that most of us had no idea who this guy Pat was or whether it would be any good. I was on the list for a critique, but time was short and there would have been around 80 of us on the course. I was wishing I would be next and wishing I wouldn't. It is quite daunting being critiqued in front of your  peers. Well time ran out and I got my wish, I was on the list but we were out of time.

I will probably say a bit more about Pat on MySpace

It was a great weekend and if you are into music writing and get the opportunity, I would highly recommend attending one of his courses. As well as teaching at the Berklee School of Music he also runs online courses through them and has written 3 books. I bought a copy of 'Writing Better Lyrics' which he kindly dedicated to me with an autograph.

One of the many tools he gave us was Object Writing, which is an exercise I have committed to for 10 minutes each day, anyway, I said I would write more about this at MySpace, so I won't go on here. Needless to say I am feeling energised and keen to get to work writing more songs.

Hopefully there will also be networking opportunities as a consequence of the course, so I will get to meet and maybe collaborate with some of the other attendees. Meanwhile, back to work tomorrow to Pay the Piper:)

Went to a concert last night on Mount Eden, in a little natural ampitheatre which was obviously a small volcanic cone. When I say samll, there would have been 3,000 of us at a guess.

Anika Moa started off with some dry humour and her latest hits. She did a really good job warming up a typical Auckland crowd that don't show much enthusiasm for anything. Flight of the Conchord came on next and gave us some great humour, they are a 'band' well they say they are, like you can have a band of two people, you can have a one man band can't you, so you can have 2 one man bands and then join them into one. They do band kinda stuff, like they have a repertoire of sounds (strums one chord) like that was one of the4 many sounds they have on tap. Anyway, I guess you had to be there.

Then came Bic Runga for an excellent couple of sets including an appearance by Neil Finn of Crowded House fame. he did his best to stay low key because this was Bic's tour, promoting her new album Birds.Some great Kiwi music.

I forgot to mention an excellent Maori welcome by the local iwi with conches and a great haka. That's the sort of stuff that makes you proud of our Maori brothers.

Then after an excellent concert, we got back to the car and found that some bastard had smashed the passenger window and broken into it. Had to drive home with glass everywhere. Rang the police and they said that due to the large number of cars that get broken into in Auckland every Saturday nights, they wouldn't come out to print it, especially as nothing had been stolen other than the mount for my Navman GPS unit, which is safely in my drawer at work. It's pouring down with rain today, so I can't take it out to get it fixed. Sad ending to a good night.