One of my more “popular” Jewish liturgical settings is a melody I wrote to the medieval hymn, L’chah Dodi. L’chah Dodi is sung during Kabbalat Shabbat, the Friday night prayer service that welcomes Shabbat. It describes two companions going out to greet the Sabbath Bride. The words were written in the city of Tzfat, birthplace […]
Songwriting
Poems and Stories
I recently had a chance to become aware of a bias of mine. It’s a songwriting bias. The bias is this: when I write songs I think of them as poems set to music. There I’ve said it. When I write songs, I think of them as poems. So what? Well, not much, except for […]
On the language of giving and receiving
I’ve always loved language. And over the last decade or so I’ve come to love language even more because language is at the heart of songwriting. More than blogging or journaling. Certainly more than emailing, texting, or tweeting. And in some ways even more than speaking, listening, and reading, songwriting has helped me grow closer […]
Today, if only we could hear
Of all the songs I’ve written I think this is one of the most beautiful and meaningful. It’s based on two passages from Psalm 95. The first, “v’anachnu am marito v’tzon yado,” means something like, “we, your people, are like a flock that you shepherd with your hand.” The second, “hayom im b’kolo tishmau,” means, […]
#BlogElul 2017 Day 2– Search
Searching for the sound for the chord for the note for the words for the letters for the syllables for the rhythm for the meter for the heartbeat for the loud for the quiet for the silence of the song
Every song writer’s dream
I logged in to Facebook today to find that I’d been tagged in a post. But it wasn’t just any post. It was a post from my NC based songleading colleague, Penny White. And it included a video of her teaching my song, Rise Up, at her community camp in NC. As you might imagine, […]