As a composer, I often tend to get lost in a groove. I find some chord/melody progression and just riff on it endlessly until it works its way through my system, and this is one of those.

Unfortunately, if you listen to it all the way to the end, not much happens other than a little change-up before for a few bars intended conceptually as a fadeout.

It is what it is.

I call this one “Pointless” because it is. This is the fourth lame composition in a row on this first side of the first tape in my Composer’s Sketchbook. And its the last song on that side as well. What a horrible way to end the first of 17 volumes!!!

Perhaps I shouldn’t compose on the guitar and stick to piano and keyboards. Hey – I heard that! “Perhaps they shouldn’t compose at all.” Yeah, well if you listened to it this far, the joke’s on you.

So, Volume 1 is at an end, with Volume 2 sure to follow. But for God’s sake I hope I shook off meaningless mood between one side of the cassette tape and the next.

Let’s find out together….

I call this one “Go Somewhere” because I wish it would. Listening to this again after all these years I can totally connect to my mood when I wrote it. Trying to be upbeat, totally uninspired, messing with the guitar to stave off a growing malaise, and coughing this up on my recorder like some sort of acoustic hair ball.

I say this because my long-haired cat just hocked one up on the carpet, interrupting the completion of this post. And there you have it.

If you’ve composed music, you know that every once in a while you get trapped in a repetitive monotonous cascade that just endlessly plods along until you can break free and let it die.

That’s all the introduction you need to this one.

Written and recorded in the early 1970s.

Just a good-natured stroll on a Saturday morning with a few interesting chords along the way.

Written and recorded in the early 1970s.

This one was designed to be a record of a cool guitar riff, but then my big, fat voice drowns it all out on my low-tech early generation cassette recorder. Still, you can hear the first couple of bars clean, and it also peaks out here and there throughout (but not much).

To me, this sounds a bit like some of Paul Williams’ work on the song, Rainbow Connection, in the first Muppet Movie. So I wondered, which came first: the Williams or the Phillips? I looked it up on Wikipedia. The Muppet Movie came out in 1979. So it looks like I invented this sound on my own, or rather stumbled into it while tooling around on my electric guitar.

Nothing much to see here. Move along… move along….

Just two short guitar riffs, bordering on country rock, and one of them was used by The Beatles at least once that I recall. Really, this was just me trying a little finger melody as opposed to just simple strummed chords.

At my prime, back when I was playing the strings every day, I got respectable enough, but honestly, I just don’t have the dexterity to get anywhere near those guitar virtuosos whose fingers flash all over the neck of the damn beast from one end to the other to the point you can imagine the thing actually catching fire.

That ain’t me. In fact, I was rather proud of myself just for getting this far. That’s okay, we should be judged only by how much we push our own personal envelopes.

This little riff invented itself while I was messing around with my electric guitar just to unwind, which is why most of my music is created initially. Then it gets out of hand and I try to record it properly and multi-track an arrangement and I get all wound up again. Go figure.

Be that as it may, this is by no means an original sound, though I didn’t copy it from anything. After I strummed it out I could hear it was well-used. I’d just never used it. So, sometime you reinvent the wheel, or perhaps is your subconscious popping out music you’ve heard so many times that you can’t name one specific place it came from?

Jus how original is original thought? Is this thought original? Does it matter?

Recorded in the early 1970s.

This one is just a simple chord progression with some not so simple chords. At the time, the chords reminded me of the ones Paul Simon used in the Bridge Over Troubled Waters album on the song, So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.

I didn’t set out to copy Simon’s chords, but they had impressed me and no doubt influenced me. In tooling around on the guitar, I stumbled upon my version, and documented it here. How this might become a song, I don’t know. Still needs a chorus and bridge, but the cool part is here, so maybe someday, as if I had all eternity to do it.

This one opens with some really unusual chords. The beginning of the recording is slightly cut off, so don’t judge it by that – wait until the melody repeats itself a few bars later.

I don’t really read music (sure I can identify the notes, but I can’t play from sheet music, only by ear). So, I don’t know for sure why this opening sounds so unusual, but I think it is because it doesn’t begin in a standard key of C. Maybe you know? In any event, it sounds rather sweet and sour at the same time to my ear.

That odd opening should be enough to make folks ears perk up if it was ever recorded properly. And then there’s a minor hook or two in the chorus as well – enough to keep the interest going, in my estimation.

This song has some very unusual words for me, as I recall, but unfortunately the recording is so muddy I can only resolve some of them. Still, I can hear enough to know that, like my poetry, the lyrics create unusual perspectives and juxtapositions. Perhaps someday someone will be able to decipher what I’m signing and send me a copy so I stuff in here and we can all appreciate it.