UPDATING THE JOE SONGBOOK...

Just finished updating THE JOE SONGBOOK with the 2009 songs. The book is now 103 pages long, with 65 songs (with discography, links and photos—I can’t resist dressing things up). For the record, only 14 of the 65 songs are about dead animals. (Those are still the ones people remember best.)

A copy of the songbook is going off to Lorelei Loveridge in England tomorrow. She said she was interested in performing some of my stuff, and I’m happy to encourage it. I don’t know what (if anything) of my songs she’d like, but the songbook is rather a diverse, “something for everybody” collection. With luck, there’s something for her.

There are only two co-writes in the book—where someone else and I jointly wrote the lyrics, as well as me putting it to music—“Dead Things in the Shower” (with Bobbie Gallup) and “Born Again Barbie” (with Scott Rose). None of the “musications” are in there, because I don’t consider those “my songs”—as far as I’m concerned, the song “belongs” to whoever wrote the lyrics. All I did was provide a delivery system for their excellent lyrics. (And they’re excellent lyrics because I’m not interested in dealing with anything else.)

(There’s a third co-write that’s not in the book—“Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire,” co-written with my daughter Kimberly a couple of years ago. It’s not in there because I really don’t remember the chords. I suppose I will have to puzzle them out again, in case somebody requests it sometime over Christmas. All I remember is I couldn’t do Mel Torme’s music because it was too complicated—all those “fruity” jazz-type chords—so I figured out a country music progression that came close. But I don’t see that I wrote it down anywhere—and writing it down, for me, is the key to remembering it.)

I had originally envisioned the songbook as a saleable item, but production costs ended up way too high; between paper, and ink cartridges for the printer, and a cheap 3-ring binder, I was over five bucks a copy, which meant I’d need to charge ten bucks a copy, and I couldn’t see anybody paying that. Lorelei’s is the third copy I’ve simply given away.

A thought, however: those high production costs were for the songbook in HARD COPY form—printed on paper, in other words. What if it were ELECTRONIC? If I could convert the songbook, which is a gigantic PageMaker file, into an Acrobat (*.pdf) file, and drop it onto a CD (if it’ll fit), I’d have production costs down to a couple of bucks. I’d have an excuse to design a neat label, too. Everybody with a computer and Internet has the free Acrobat Reader program—and I know from experience that the files generated by my old Acrobat program (I have v. 5.0) can be read by the latest version of Acrobat Reader, because I have that. This could work. Is anybody else doing e-songbooks? Not that I know of.

The Christmas Show poster is done; the first copies got distributed yesterday, with many more to do. I want to make sure copies get into the hands of people I’d like to impress with my graphic-design ability (the editors of the two area newspapers, for instance). It is eye-catching; if it’s on a bulletin board with other posters, it’s going to be the one that gets noticed—the rest will fade into the background. And it’s black-and-white—easy to reprint.

We had some of the folks from the 5-1/2 Piece Band from Rockaway at the Library, so I got to try out some new stuff on ‘em. “The Dog’s Song” is a keeper; everybody likes it. Ditto for “Me and Rufus, and Burnin’ Down the House”—though part of its charm, I’m sure, is that librarian Sara likes it, and it was about her house fire. My rendition of “Santa, Baby” came off okay—I’d spent most of the day practicing making my voice drip sultriness—and now I suppose people will be requesting it (it was a small audience, but I’m sure they’ll talk). And I had one lady from the audience ask if “Armadillo on the Interstate” was on a record (which it isn’t—which just reinforces my intention to have it on the next one).

Joe