ALL Magazine November 2016 | Page 48

Who are two song writers that have influenced your song writing and why?? ……………………………….... Bob Dylan has had the most influence on me as a singer and a songwriter. I first heard of Bob Dylan with his hit songs “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Rainy Day Women no. 12 & 35” on the radio when I was a young teenager. I had never heard anything like this before on Top 40 radio and I really liked it. His sound, especially his voice was so gripping. His lyrics “how does it feel to be without a home,” and “everybody must get stoned” were nothing I had heard before and it gave me pause as to what was going on in these songs and yet they rocked-out as well. But it wasn’t until a few years later when I got my first acoustic guitar and purchased a chord book that my songwriting began to start. To learn chords, I would try to put the chords in some sort of order so I could practice playing them without being bored. It was so much fun and it was the beginning of how I started composing “songs.” What made it even more fun was putting words to these chord arrangements. Some chord patterns would remind me of other popular songs. I would write my own lyrics that I thought were similar yet were personal to me. During this time I came across a songbook of Bob Dylan with a lot of his songs and some I never heard of before. I tried practicing these and reading his lyrics. I really felt a connection with his expressive words and the music he wrote. It was so cool when I finally heard some of these songs on record for the first time. I realized the way I interpreted some of them was way off because I knew nothing of how to read music. He became such an influence on me, I considered him my mentor/teacher/instructor. I was also fortunate to know other musicians who knew a lot more about Bob Dylan. They shared their knowledge of his songs, his history, his connection to the beat poets, and more. I would listen to the blues and folk legends like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. But it was Bob Dylan’s music that helped give me a starting point and showed a path to express myself in my own way. Other major influences are not so much one singular person but a mixture of different artists and bands throughout the years. For example: Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Gene Pitney, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Young Rascals, Jimi Hendrix, The Velvet Underground, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, The Ramones, Richard Hell, and Elvis Costello. These and more have had different influences on me one way or another.