I'm Stuck on Band-Aids....

Yea, these commercial jingles I’ve been doing on the road have been received very well. They always where, I never quite understood why. I guess it just because there so familiar and there so, and you never hear any one performing them, so I guess it’s kinda like a naval tee. When I began doing them in concert many, many years ago, oh they would just stop the show every night and the first night that they stop the show nobody was more surprised they I was because it was just like a fun little thing that I put together. I stopped doing it for many, many years and now as I’m doing the Remaining Tour when the live album comes up, I go to the piano and I just reminisce about the commercial jingles and play a few of them and oh, people just love to hear them all over again they just fell very familiar they’re so catchy the real popular ones are so catchy the people sing along and clap along with them immediately, it’s really a crowd pleaser isn’t it. I learned a lot from writing commercial .they insist you come up with a catchy melody in a very short time and it really did condition me to train me on how to write those catchy melodies I mean guess you really have to have a knack for it and I do, I like melody and so it came very easy to me, but the ideal of condensing it in a short amount of time that was kind of challenging and so many people go after commercials, there are so many commercial writers, commercial jingle writers that the competition is fierce, so when I was doing it for two years, it was just very, very intense. I learned a lot. A lot about the writing songs and I think it’s translated into song writing. Sometimes I can, of course when you write a 3 minute, 4 minute pop song, you can kind of relax a little bit. You don’t have to do it in fifteen seconds, but it’s always in my consciousness when I get to the melody, the main melody the hook of the song. Make sure it’s catchy, make sure it’s sing able, make sure you can walk away from the piano and sing it back without needing the piano or the guitar as a crutch, make sure you can remember it the next morning. Those are the kind of rules I go by .Most of the clients that we worked for when we where writing, when I was writing jingles with my collaborators were frustrating and because to a musician, the clients don’t speak the same language, much as the record companies doesn’t speak the same musicians language and it’s always frustrating, it did train me a lot while I was working in jingles on how to relate and communicate with my record company when I got a record contract, but it’s frustrating to a musician because these clients didn’t really know what they where talking about, but as I, and as frustrating as it was, I always tried to listen to what they where trying to tell me. They would bumble and stumble, but what they where really trying to tell me that it either wasn’t really catchy enough or it wasn’t landing right, or it wasn’t making them emotional enough and they couldn’t tell it to me in musician terms and so I had to learn their language and have it translated into musical terms and it was frustrating and it made me incredibly crazy but I, in the long run, I’m grateful for that lesson because it did make me learn about the mass public, how they response to, how they will respond to a melody and I’m very happy I went through those days.