Day 145: More Kids Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Lady Gaga attempts to eggscape from marauding pre-teen fans

Today I've been spending some much needed Kwal-Al-Tee time with my GLW (good lady wife). Then teaching kids. Teaching adults. Then doing a school gig. Traditionally no matter how many kids are down to do it a good percentage don't turn up. So I wasn't too fearful of putting a group of 40 kids aged 8-10 forward.

Well wouldn't ya know it about 50 of the blighters showed up. So thanks to Long Jenny Silver Morton who helped me get all of em in tune so we could rock out with our rendishun of Bad Romance.

Oh Yes. I am, in fact, down with the kids.

After all that I felt, "I'm tired, I deserve a night off". But I couldn't do it people. I had to go down to the Matt Cave (aka my bedroom) and play through a few old songs for ideas.

Results

• A couple of really bad old songs filed away. Did I say bad? I should be doing a blog called Matt Blick Bad Songwriting Academy where my younger self demonstrates how NOT to write songs...
• One bad old song called That My Heart May Sing that has something about the 2nd verse lyrics that speaks to me still. Back in the song starts folder for you. (Update: This has now become Never Be Silent)
• Some transcriptions of old Vineyard songs that I now have the real music for - bin!
• A song I transcribed written by my old pastor! In the 'songs written by others' folder
• A crazy little interesting song that I never recorded called Small Is The Gate. Into the song starts folder. Maybe I'll record it now I have some recording gear.

So that was a productive half hour.



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A Week In The Life

Quote of the week.

Teaching guitar to a class full of kids

ME :“what should you do when you can’t play something properly?”
Kids: “Mime”
Me: “No. What should you do?”
Kids: “Give up”

The correct answer, in case you’re wondering, was “practice”.

Welcome to my world. By next year I anticipate answer number 3 will be “autotune.”

My own personal download festival

It seems like only 11 months and 16 days ago I was blogging about my song downloads surpassing the 100 mark. This week they topped a thousand!

1013 to be precise and 110 sheet music PDFs on top of that. This is amazing. Thank you!
Looks like those two days I spent doing html on my download page paid off (even if I do start twitching when anyone says “anchor text”).

The Eglon Song (375+) & The Weight of Glory (just topped 125) are still the big hitters, along with Great High Priest (though First Black President & The Ballad of N.D.C. are starting to catch up).

New kid in class The Greatest Commandment has started to make a few friends in the playground and at 25 downloads he’s no longer last to get picked for football.

My very good friends...

I had no idea when I posted my rant about gospel rap being criminally under-valued that Tedashii, Trip Lee & DJ Official would fly all the way to Nottingham to thank me personally. But they did!

OK they didn’t. But they did do a gig in the world’s best city. It was the sweatiest time I've had in Church since I had a Lamb Rogan Josh the night before a baptism service. It was off the chain fo'shizzle. But where was you? Where was you at?

Back in the real world...

I spent most of last Saturday doing some guitar overdubs on Ben Green’s new song There Is Mercy. Download the original version here unless you want to wait and hear how I ruined a perfectly good worship song.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to head to Barrow Upon Soar for a songwriting seminar run by Joel Payne of Resoundworship.org

I may have another song nearing completion. I’m on the 3rd rewrite of the chorus already so don’t get too excited. Oh, and by the way, it’s a congregational worship song.
Remember when I used to just write those?


Related Posts: A letter to my pupils

Your next 1013 downloads