SONGS AND SCRIPTS AND DUNKING BISCUITS
Every day tales of a winging-it creative
Author: Paul Ariss
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It’s a wet, cold Monday night in February. I had planned to go to the gym as part of my three-day training routine. But the house is warm and the sofa is…responsive. It’s old, it knows how I like things, it encourages me to slouch like the evil soft furnishings monster it is. I start…
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What is the favourite photo you have ever taken? What is about it that makes the image so special? When I was asked this recently, I considered a photo taken of my father a couple of years before he passed away, back when he was still relatively healthy, delighted to be with two of his…
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What are the main things that we should be grateful for but are most likely to take for granted? Do we ever even think about them until they are under threat? When prompted recently to think of five things I am most grateful for it was good to stop and consider those things upon which…
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When we are a teenager, which of course covers the years when we are fully cocooned in school, to the years when we are released to the ‘freedoms’ of getting a job and actually earning money, we make many wrong choices and waver between unearned confidence to unnecessary insecurity. I was more the latter, in…
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Friendships are part of the bedrock of life. Even the more casual friendships can bring colour and humour and help with perspective. The banter (the type that is convivial and teasing and not the Yorkshire Cricket Club racist brand), can help us to not take ourselves too seriously and lighten our moods amid the stresses…
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One of the downsides to having to promote my songs or blogs is the need to do exactly that – promote. I’m not a promote type person. My moniker is not Promotion Paul. At school my fellow pupils would never have voted me as Pupil Most Likely to Promote. However, since I somewhat accidentally started…
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A song of mine, Your Truest Faith, has just been selected for the playlist of internet radio station South California Singer-Songwriter Radio based in Rosemead, near Los Angeles. It’s probably not a career-changing moment but for myself, who saw the California singer-songwriter scene of the late 70’s and 80’s as the holy grail for anyone…
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The insecurity around releasing a song can be creatively traumatic. What if it’s rubbish? What if I’ve inadvertently stolen it? What if I love it and no-one else does? Can I still change my name and live in an igloo without any internet connection? Putting a song onto streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple…
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Sitting in traffic on Tuesday morning it was hard not to get lockdown nostalgia. The hour- long delay to my journey brought about a reminder of a world it was easy to think lay in the distant past. It was my first traffic jam for over a year. Yet it felt so depressingly familiar. The…
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I came late to alcohol. Domestic circumstances, of which I won’t bore you to drink with, meant I was 25 before I was hit with the pile driver of my first hangover. I was the lyricist in a two-man song writing partnership with composer Bob Mouat, and we had generated interest from a couple of…
SONGS AND SCRIPTS AND DUNKING BISCUITS 