The Cinder Notes CD will be releasing soon, and I wanted to share the track listing and a little bit about how I "write" music.  It's all about the song titles for me - I truthfully spend a ridiculous amount of time coming up with them to make that they are unique enough, interesting enough and just plain cool enough to tell the story of the CD.  Sometimes a couple of words sound really good together, and so I write a song around that.  Other times the titles are based off of an interesting place or story associated with it, and I write the music around that.  I rarely write a song and name it later.   For this CD the titles just had to be earthy and rustic, with a cool, laid back vibe where they were all intertwined with each other.   

As for "writing" music - I don't.  It's all by memory in my mind, and the only thing I look at and write down are the song titles, going through many drafts of the songs, re-arranging the order of songs, etc.  I went through about 10 "drafts" of the song lists on this CD, flipping to a new page in the journal every time I added a song, removed a song, or changed the order.  It keeps it simple.  The picture below is the actual journal page of the final track listing I looked at when recording and where it all evolved from.  After this one, I leave a few pages blank and start with the next CD's song list.  In the next few blog posts I'll share my thoughts behind each track in more detail than the liner notes.  

I hope to release the CD late next week, until then...