dB’s Holsapple Blogs For NY Times

Goin’ fishing for tunes with one of America’s preeminent songwriters.

By Fred Mills

What do you get when you pair up a brainy, literate, but passionate, songwriter with an open forum for songwriters? Why, Peter Holsapple blogging for the New York Times, of course! Holsapple — aka one-fourth of pop mavens The dB’s, Chris Stamey’s partner-in-penmanship, solo performer, and a noted sideman (R.E.M., Hootie & the Blowfish, etc.) — was the latest in a stellar assemblage of songwriters to be asked to author the paper’s “Measure For Measure: How to Write a Song and Other Mysteries,” an ongoing blog series that has thus far included the wisdom (and frequently the wit, too) of Rosanne Cash, Andrew Bird, Suzanne Vega and Darrell Brown.

The Times describes the blog thusly: “With music now available with a single, offhand click, it's easy to forget that songs are not born whole, polished and ready to play. They are created by artists who draw on some combination of craft, skill and inspiration. In the coming weeks, the contributors to this blog -- all accomplished songwriters -- will pull back the curtain on the creative process as they write about their work on a song in the making.”

And, indeed, Holsapple’s lengthy installment posted last week fit the bill perfectly. “I found a new song swimming around in my head yesterday afternoon,” he writes. “I’ve landed it and will prepare it before you. I’ve fished these parts for years, and I know that once I identify what’s on the end of my line, we can proceed.” Proceed he does, taking the reader down the path of a tune’s creation, along the way unspooling interesting tidbits and factoids about his life as well as his friends Stamey and Mitch Easter.

There’s also a fascinating trifecta of MP3s: “Like Wow,” a Holsapple composition from his early Winston-Salem, NC, band Rittenhouse Square; “Big Black Truck,” from a rare solo EP he issued prior to joining Stamey’s dB’s; and “Black and White,” one of his classic dB’s tracks. (Caveat: the Times’ MP3 players appear to be somewhat buggy.)

By the end of his blog entry, Holsapple has crafted a good chunk of his new song for the readers but it’s getting late and he realizes it’s time to let it rest until morning (a strategy most any writer of any stripe will tell you is a good one). “Play the chorus again. Still that landing feels so unsure and insecure. There’s got to be a better chord than F there, but I’ll be damned if I can find it at this hour. So I’ll go to bed, humming the chorus, thinking of alternate lines, waiting for that lightning bolt of inspiration that may or may not arrive in the night. I’ll keep the notebook by the bed, even though most of my mid-sleep epiphanies have been unintelligible instructions and drawings thus far.”

Good luck finishing the song Peter. Can we hear the demo when you’re done? Signed, your friends at BLURT.

Peter Holsapple on MySpace

The dB’s Official Website

[Editor’s Note: Both the dB’s and Stamey & Holsapple have new albums in the works. Watch this space for details.]