"It's not those who write the laws who run the country, it's those who write the songs."     Chinese Proverb

Home | Blog | Energy Caper | Songs | Posters | Photos | Psychology | Links | Contact

The Energy Caper

Put The Answers
On Your Wall!

The Guitar Poster™

If you are a musician you absolutely must check out these beautiful, educational posters for guitar, keyboard, bass, sax and MIDI.

Click Here!

 

 

You have arrived at Scotty & The Skeptics™ song-demo page.

WANTED!

Future Grammy Winners

I am putting this page up as a vehicle for pitching songs to musicians and industry pros who would otherwise never know about them. I am also hopeful that those who visit because of the songs will check out the novel, and that those who come for the novel will give a listen to the songs. You never know who's out there surfing.

Note: The Skeptics are the band I hope to form the day after I hit the lottery. I am not a performer, and I've needed a lot of help over the years to make a few song demos. I'm hoping some future Grammy winners will surf in to this page, realize they could kick ass with their versions of my tunes, and record a few Grammy-winning, chart-topping hits. It's worth a shot.

I write songs in spurts, but when I run the numbers it turns out I've averaged about two finished songs a year (and an equal number which never quite got finished). That gives me about sixty kicking around on lyric sheets and old tapes--mushy love songs, country weepers, hard rockers, folky ballads, children's tunes, even a Broadway show tune or two—most of which have never been demoed or heard outside my living room and at a few open mics.

The plan is to make videos of me doing each of them and post them here, MySpace, YouTube, whereever I can. I already have a primitive site with a never-released collection called Speak Your Mind which I will be folding into this page as the project progresses. Most of the tunes there are in my satirical mode and were demoed between 1982 and 2004 as part of my quixotic attempt to change the world through ridicule and satire.

I also have demos of varying quality of some of my pop, rock, and folk tunes, though the majority of my non-political songs have never been demoed. I figure if I do one every couple weeks or it it will take me about two years to video them all. The herky-jerky YouTube format seems like it is very forgiving of performers with my limitations, and I'm at the stage of life where I really don't give a flying duck what anybody thinks. I just want to get the songs out there.

Song demos? What the heck are song demos?

Not long after I after picked up the guitar a writer friend who could play was showing me a new chord and we accidentally wrote a song. I was already trying to become the next Hemmingway or Vonnegut, so why not write a few songs? Historically, songwriters and lyricists who were not famous performers—and I had never been a performer or musician of any kind—had provided America with many of its songs. In the tradition of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, and Nashville, the goal was to get a song "cut" by somebody famous who could make it a hit.

I don't know when songwriters stopped turning in songs as sheet music, but from at least the Seventies until the late Nineties songwriters were expected to provide demo tapes with simple arrangements, the bare bones of a song. The advice in the magazines and how-to seminars put on by BMI and ASCAP was that managers, publishers, and honchos did not want demos cluttered up with amateur harmonies and instrumentation. They supposedly knew what they were doing, and wanted to use their professional "ears" to hear a song as their artists might do it. In our digital age the honchos are lazy and now want full-production, radio-ready demos. Most of mine were done using the old bare-bones premise: demo the song, not the performer.

Home | Blog | Energy Caper | Songs | Posters | Photos | Psychology | Links | Contact

Home | Blog | Energy Caper | Songs | Posters | Photos | Psychology | Links | Contact © 2007