Gillian Welch – Look At Miss Ohio Gillian Welch cracked the mainstream with the help of producer T-Bone Burnett and the filmmaking siblings Joel and Ethan Coen and their quirky Depression Era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? Gillian was hired as Associate Producer of the related album, to invest her authentic take on the roots music of the period and to...

Badfinger, bad luck, bad management… and the accidental standard. A weekly column by Inside Songwriting contributor, Michael J Roberts. Most aspiring writers dream of coming up with a standard, a song so compelling and assured it connects to the collective subconscious and becomes an ongoing feature of the musical landscape, a song for the ages. Some arrive...

A Songwriter’s vision has pattern and individuality. A scope that is our own. When our eyes and ears scan our environment, we zoom in and zoom around. Where we land, is what makes the difference. KB – Zen Songwriting...

John Fogerty – Long As I Can See the Light   John Fogerty was the brains and voice of Creedence Clearwater Revival, if not the heart and some of the personal foibles that have bedevilled him are evident in his music if one looks closely enough. Fogerty was a driven perfectionist; both he and his brother Tom survived an alcoholic father, after their...

John Mayer – King Of California, Ryan Adams – Court Jester A weekly column by Inside Songwriting contributor, Michael J Roberts. It may be time to reassess the critical merits of John Mayer as a writer in relation to the comments from Mr Mandy Moore, the Alt-country aging enfante terrible Ryan Adams. Every songwriter has a benchmark work/artist that...

Andrew Gold – Lonely Boy   Andrew Gold was born into a Los Angeles showbiz family, his father Ernest was a Hollywood composer who won an Academy Award for Exodus and his mother was a singer who provided the screen singing voices for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Natalie Wood in West Side Story. Gold was a precocious...

Musicianship and songwriting – Do you want a diminished ninth with that? A weekly column by Inside Songwriting contributor, Michael J Roberts. One question that keeps popping up over the journey, in regards to writing, is what level of musicianship is required in order to write a great song?  That’s something I wanted to address in this weeks column and it’s...

Elton John – I’ve Seen That Movie Too Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin are one of the longest standing partnerships in all of popular song writing history, yet even they will admit their best stuff (like almost all songwriters) was produced in a condensed time frame during shorter, intense periods. One of those astonishingly productive periods centred...