Tale of the Tunes
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Jonathan Brader's songwriting diary.
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First Take Friday - Episode #61 Roddy the Reindeer Written by Jonathan Brader Tale of the Tune: This tune is written from the perspective of a 10 year old kid who dreamt that he was on Santa’s Reindeer Team. The kid is a tad bid older looking back on that Christmas Eve when he was 10 years old. Of course, I was thinking about my kids when I was writing this one. Not much more to it than that. Merry Christmas! Thanks for watching/listening. JB
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First Take Fridays - Episode #60 A Letter to Father Christmas Written by Jonathan Brader Tale of the Tune: It’s the day after Thanksgiving, folks!! You know what that means? You guessed it! Christmas Songs are back!!! I love Christmas!! I love the good & the bad movies, but I only like the good songs. There are a lot of bad Christmas songs. Hopefully this won't prove to be one of them. When I record this tune in the studio I promise you that it will be awesome! This song is called "A Letter to Father Christmas". It’s written from the perspective of a younger person than myself. Perhaps a high school or college student. Listen to it. It is pretty self explanatory. I wish I had more time to make this one better, or to at least record it a second time, but If I did, this songwriting series wouldn't be called First Take Fridays, eh?! Merry Christmas! Don't go shopping!!! Your presence is the present. As always, thank you for watching/listening, JB First Take Fridays, Vol. 5 (Episodes 50-59) - Liner Notes Tale of The Tunes : Happy Thanksgiving! When you're traveling around this weekend, I would like to encourage you to listen to this album. It is perfect for a drive, but bus and plane rides work well too. This album spawned from a road trip. I was kind of tired of listening to the kid friendly podcasts and then I had an idea - I thought it would be cool to tell a story with music and make an album out of it that would be perfect for road trips. I'm a history buff so I wanted to put it into a time/place that wasn't totally foreign to me. I went to Cimarron, New Mexico when I was in high school with the Boy Scouts. It was amazing. There is a huge 140,000+ acre Boy Scout Ranch there where scouts spend 2 weeks over the summer backpacking. It is a beautiful place and it is what I had in mind when I wrote this entire thing. That and my love for westerns. You don't see too many westerns anymore. Cowboy Dan, Esparelda and Big Bad Jim are the main characters with a supporting cast of unnamed townies. It is a little rough around the edges, but that is the whole idea behind of the First Take Friday series. I need to be free to write music in the shortest amount time possible. I just don't have the time to make them perfect. At some point, I will record a studio album, but currently, time is fleeting and this is the best I can do. Thank you for bearing with me. Track 1 - The Cattle Ranch This one is totally freestyle. I actually free-styled the entire story twice. Unfortunately, I told a different story each time, and some of it was just awful, so I had to re-write a lot of it. At some point, I may release them all, but we'll see. It would give you a behind the scenes look at my writing process which may be cool. Let me know in the comments if you want to check them out. So, this song just popped into my head and I went with it. This is how I write a lot of my music actually. If I had to define my style, I think that would be it. Freestyle Singer/Songwriter I don't think that is genre though, but I'm coining the term now if it isn't coined already. It's out of control near the end when I said that he opened up a mine. Ugh. It happens, but that's why I love it. If you are struggling to be creative, I would recommend that you just stop thinking. It's the only way to be ceative for me. The boundaries in your mind have to be knocked down. Track 2 - Esparelda Every story needs a heroine so I made mine a french girl. I imagine her to be extremely well traveled and extremely intelligent. She speaks a number of languages. Grew up in France, but traveled extensively with her family. Fun fact about this song, is that I had surgery the week before I recorded this and the tube they stuck down my throat really messed up my voice as you can hear for the next few tunes. Track 3 - BIG BAD JIM I like to walk my dog super early in the morning. After freestyling a version of this, I had to make some serious edits so I was walking one morning and I thought it would be sweet to write a song based off of a wanted poster. I wanted Jim to be a mean dude. Super mean! I ultimately turned into a vampire, but hey, it happens, I guess, right? Track 4 - Cowboy Dan, Part One This tune started it all. Actually, Cowboy Dan, Part Two is the first song I freestyled that forced me to write The Adventures of Cowboy Dan. Sometimes you just have to start it and the rest will come. That's basically what happened here. I wanted Cowboy Dan to be an awesome person. I think he turned out to be. He was a Navajo and I imagined that his mother was Irish. He was a peaceful man and he thought the Civil War was ridiculous, so he became a mediator. Being a Navajo, his land was stolen by the Government, so he wanted his land back. He bought what became "The Cattle Ranch" with the money he earned from his work as a mediator during the war. Track 5 - Comedy Suplex Podcart Theme Song This tune was written for @peachmachine and @dirtyronmcdonald. They have a podcast about comedy, wrestling, boxing, MMA, etc and they needed a theme song. PeachMachine had been asking me to write him something for months, but I didn't get around to it until this week. Since I was in the middle of a set of songs, I thought I'd just drop this one in as a bit of an intermission. Track 6 - BANG! Everyone thinks cell phones are pretty cool, but what's cooler to me is the way folks used to communicate. Talk about creativity! This song is about the way they communicated on "The Cattle Ranch". Track 7 - The Night the Devil Came to Santa Fe This tune fell just a few weeks prior to Halloween. One night when I was in bed unable to sleep, I thought it would be cool to turn Big Bad Jim into a vampire, so I did. Track 8 - Don't Scream This tune was written the week of Halloween. I needed to get the townsfolk prepared for the fact that a vampire was on the loose. That is what this song is about. Track 9 - Beer Me! This one was written/recorded off the top of my head, Free-styled, as you can probably tell within the first few seconds of the song. Anyway this tune needed to start the descent of the arc of the story. I needed something to neutralize Big Bad Jim. This was it. I didn't want the story to be violent or anything since my kids were going to be listening to it. Track 10 - Cowboy Dan, Part Two This track is the song that spawned the entire thing. I had some whistling in the original freestyle version. I cleaned it up and this is the final result. Cowboy Dan sleeping by a river waiting for morning with cattle to deliver. About 500 head. Track 11 - Santa Fe Sunset Every story needs and ending, and I didn't have much time to write this one. It is completely different from the two freestyle versions, if I'm not mistaken (haven't seen them in a while). But I digress, time is making fools of us again, dear friend. I must wrap this up. Thank you for reading this, if you've gotten this far. More importantly, thank you for listening. This set of songs will be released on a studio album at some point in time....I hope. I will call it The Adventures of Cowboy Dan; Santa Fe Sunset. A bit about the album cover - I took this picture on a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park in July of 2015. Just a couple of cowboys cruising through Colorado. I hope you can enjoy this album with your Family & Friends and I thank you for checking it out and for supporting an independent musician. Happy Thanksgiving, Folks! Thank you, Jonathan Brader  First Take Friday - Episode #59 Santa Fe Sunset Written by Jonathan Brader Tale of the Tune: This is the 10th, and final, song in The Adventures of Cowboy Dan; Santa Fe Sunset In last week’s episode, Cowboy Dan, Part Two, Dan and some unnamed townsfolk put together a posse of cowboys to retrieve the 500-ish cattle that Big Bad Jim fixed up. This week’s episode is the end of the set, so like any good western worth it’s weight in wagon wheels, the end had to be super cliché, hence this song, Santa Fe Sunset. Writing a themed set of songs turned out to be a LOT more challenging than I had originally anticipated, but it has also been SO much fun!!! I hope you enjoy The Adventures of Cowboy Dan; Santa Fe Sunset. Hopefully Cowboy Dan will return at some point in the future for more adventures, but for now, this is it. First Take Fridays, Vol. 5 (Episodes 50-59) will be available shortly on all online music retailers, so keep an eye peeled. Next week, it’s time for Christmas! Oddly enough, when I was in Boy Scouts I celebrated Christmas in July at the Philmont Boy Scout Ranch in New Mexico. It was pretty amazing and in a way, it helped to inspire The Adventures of Cowboy Dan. Thanks for watching/listening. JB First Take Friday - Episode 58 Cowboy Dan, Part Two Written by Jonathan Brader Tale of the Tune: This tune is the 9th song in the Adventures of Cowboy Dan; Santa Fe Sunset In last week’s episode, Big Bad Jim revealed that he is a man-loving vampire and veterinarian so he only drinks the blood of an occasional bull or cow. This week’s episode is Cowboy Dan, Part Two. Dan and some townsfolk put together a posse of cowboys to retrieve the 500-ish cattle that Big Bad Jim has fixed up. The song harkens back to First Take Friday, Episode #53 – Cowboy Dan, Part One with the melody, but the key is changed and the story is a bit different. Next week, we’ll wrap this story with a ride into the Santa Fe Sunset. More to come, Thanks for watching/listening. JB Tale of the Tune: This tune is the 8th song in the Adventures of Cowboy Dan; Santa Fe Sunset In last week’s episode, the townsfolk had to figure out how to fend off a vampire. This week, I was super busy, so I had zero time to write a song. FREESTYLE FIRST TAKE FRIDAY in FULL effect! I wish I had more time to re-write this one, but the freestyle effort sums it up pretty well. Refinements will definitely be made to all of the First Take Fridays, but especially this one. Unfortunately, my life is pretty hectic, and the only way that I can write music is by recording it. Why keep it to myself? So that's why some of the First Take Fridays really suck. I promise you that they are all works in progress. Thankfully, for you, I’ve already written next week’s episode, Cowboy Dan, Part 2. It is the song that inspired The Adventures of Cowboy Dan, so I’m very excited to share it with you on November 9th. More to come, Thanks for watching/listening. JB |
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