I've been writing and singing songs since long before you were born. Not many mention food, though, and that's definitely something to work on, because I haven't gotten beyond peaches and apples. Joseph Conrad said that the artists' appeal is through the senses, and in the songs, certainly, is a dearth of food. In my defense, in my youth I played many hours at the Village Squire Restaurant in West Dundee, IL, and there people would have been able to order and eat food during the songs. Also free popcorn. They had two versions of the London Broil, and if you weren't careful you could get stuck with the more expensive version.
This would have been a digression, if I had established a context. When I was young I would do shows of almost all my own songs, plus usually a Scots song in dialect. These days it matters less to me whether I wrote the songs I sing. For the last few months I've been researching African-American spirituals and secular folk songs, acquiring many rare and out of print books. So I'm learning these, working toward a recording project. A protracted bout of tendinitis (the cure: Active Tissue Release, acupuncture, the Graston Technique, weights) a few years ago got me into memorizing poems, and I love to perform those as well, to introduce people to Mary Oliver and pair "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas with "Mr. Tambourine Man". Also Scottish Ballads, which I translate out of dialect. For several years I played a couple instrumental gigs a week, at places like the Blind Faith Cafe in Evanston and the Third Coast in Chicago. For these I performed Bach, Scarlatti, Renaissance and Baroque guitar pieces, some blues, UK and American fiddle tunes, mostly finger-picked. At that time I studied guitar with Shinobu Sato in Skokie, IL, a great musician and teacher. When I was 40, I wrote the basic structure of triad chords down on a page in rows and figured out what I had been working with all those years without knowing it, and mapped out more options for harmonizing. And lately I realize that you can really major or minor any of your 6 basic chords, somewhere. In arranging for guitar, I try to leave out the note I'm singing so that there will be interplay with voice and instrument. I'm a lightning rod songwriter, I don't write songs unless they're given to me. My method is, mostly, to get out of the way of the energy flow, to be calm in the presence of whatever is coming through. In editing, reworking, the principle is to trust the image.
What else. I always sing a Dave Carter song. I play clubs, festivals, colleges, radio shows, nursing homes, bars, but mostly house concerts and those are the gigs I love most. My daughter Casey and I have been performing together for a few months, and that has been my greatest experience in music.
"Calhoun is a master at story songs, finely crafted works that swiftly and economically capture a moment or express an emotion. Like the best novelists, he is able to assume different personas and see the world through other people's eyes." - June Sawyers, Chicago Tribune
"Andrew Calhoun tells the truth. To my knowledge, there is no better songwriter alive."
- Dave Carter
