Sometimes a small musical detail gives a song its character. In this month’s blog, “The Devil’s in the Details,” I describe slipping a familiar childhood taunt into a bass line, planting a hint of a lyric that arrives later in the song. It’s one of the pleasures of making music: finding ways for the instruments to join in the storytelling. For this month’s Featured Song, Defying the Sun, from our OMG album, we had a…

With a new studio coming soon, new software and several musical projects taking shape, this month’s Featured Song almost chose itself. “Change Is the Rule,”, from our album Oxy’s Morons, released earlier this year, is written from the perspective of an old-school songwriter trying to protect his craft while the musical world changes around him. He prefers worn wooden desks, pencils and paper to digital tools, effort to convenience and heart over design. He hears…

One of the biggest debates surrounding artificial intelligence isn’t whether it can produce music, art, or writing. It clearly can. The real question is whether any of it can truly be called creative. Many argue that creativity is uniquely human—that it comes from lived experience, emotion, suffering, joy, intuition, and consciousness. AI, they contend, simply recombines patterns learned from billions of human creations. It predicts. It imitates. But it never creates. Others see it differently. They argue…

With St. Patrick’s Day in sight, this month’s featured track is “Me Lucky Charms.” It’s a swaggering, tongue-in-cheek take on the Irish leprechaun… not the cute cartoon version, but a sharp-tongued trickster “full of spit and vinegar and a little sin.” SixFootStilts · Me Lucky Charms The song leans into the stereotypes on purpose: Guinness, jigs, pipes, St. Paddy’s Day walls plastered with his face, while reminding us that legend is often “bigger than truth.”…

(From Manifestation) A personal note about the featured song this month. Friends happens to be one of my wife Sandra’s favorite tracks on Manifestation. Which is mildly amusing, given that it’s essentially a song about being gently but firmly reassigned to the emotional penalty box. When I re-read the lyrics the other night, I had one of those moments where you think, “Wait a second… should I be worried?” I asked her. She laughed. Turns…

“Envious” from the album Rabbit Shtu: Magic, Myth, Monsters & High Strangeness, wraps a supernatural tale around a very human feeling: longing for what really matters. Told from the perspective of a newly minted vampire, the song playfully dismantles the fantasy of immortality. Eternal life, supernatural power, and endless nights sound impressive until you realize what’s missing. No sunrises. No tears. No compassion. No shared moments that give life its meaning. At its heart, Envious is a…