New Podcast: The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook

I’ve written pretty extensively (particularly at Blogcritics) about my interest in home recording over the years. (It was also a door into other DIY activities, such as blogging, and it’s no coincidence that Glenn Reynolds of An Army of Davids fame, Blogcritics’ Eric Olsen, and several other bloggers also have a background in this area.) But home recording means generating material to record: songs take a fair amount of work to develop properly and nurture to their conclusion; it’s easy to get stuck, and wind up staring at recording deck or computer monitor and doing nothing.

Karl Coryat, a consulting editor at Bass Player magazine, and the author of The Guerrilla Recording Handbook, and his co-author, Nicholas Dobson, have co-written a really fun book on breaking that logjam. Called The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook, it catalogs a whole host of methods of overcoming musical writer’s block, whether you’re writing your first song, or your 50th.

I interviewed them recently, and it made for an equally enjoyable 20-minute podcast. Click here to listen directly, and click here to subscribe via iTunes. Note that in both cases, no iPod is required; virtually any PC can play an MP3 file.

(Also posted at Blogcritics.)