Daniel Porter

To come up with the title of this post I had to think for a while, it went through many drafts.. and ironically that pretty much sums up my thoughts for this post… How you ask? 

Well, I don’t know if it’s the internal editor in my head that is always thinking ahead and editing what I want to say before I type it, or if it’s myself being afraid to say something in case people react in a negative way to what I have to say.  Or is it what feels like a constant lack of sleep (the joys of parenthood), I don’t know.. all I know is that when I put on my songwriters hat (and now blogging hat) this can make it hard to write.

If I’m sitting on a bus and someone sits down beside me, I can’t write anything, or if I do, I’m like a student in class making sure the person beside me can’t seen the answers I’m writing down.  Which I guess from a songwriter’s point of view, it’s being protective of an un-crafted work.. you only want to show the world the final draft of your masterpiece.

But it’s even before that these days..  I come up with an idea.. it can be shot down in my head before it’s developed.

I had a thought tonight… the last 6 months I’ve been thinking about my music A LOT.. not from a lyrical side, but more of a musical style side… What sort of music do I write/want to record?  I don’t know.

I grew up on commercial music ranging from the 50′s through to then the current day.  I went through a stage where I was wondering if I were Buddy Holly reincarnate… crazy I know..  but that was the time leading up to the musical Buddy playing in Australia.  I used to have a dream that I would be called up on stage as the understudy (and on the night we actually saw the understudy play Buddy).

These days I listen to country music a fair bit, and since I met my wife, I’ve been listening to Jazz music a fair bit.  It’s amazing how much adrealin/influences affects your mind… After I got to a Swing dance nite and see a Big Band play, I want to start to write Big Band Scores.  If I see a Jazz Trio, I want to write music for a Jazz Trio…  or a country/singer songwriter.. I want to go home and write that sort of music.

But it’s all nice to feel that way, but where does my heart lie?  I don’t really know..  Once I get back in to recording I’m going to work through some of my older ‘crappier’ songs and try and work out which direction I want to head, or more fit into.

But back to the subject at hand..  How do I start to turn off the internal editor?  Well hopefully this blog will help… at least it will start me writing something… which is a start.  Beyond that, I guess practice and either feeling more comfortable with what I want to say or start to care less about how others ‘might’ respond.  Oh, and also not putting things off… I messed around looking at different systems to blog for over a year.. and it only took about a month to post this after installation

Daniel