Songwriting

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The Songwriting Side of the Practice.

The Kinetic Experience

Somewhere between the consulting work and the books, there is a third room. I go into it with a notebook, a theme or interesting phrase, and a question I have not yet finished asking. That room is The Kinetic Experience. It holds my own lyric and songwriting work, and it holds the work I do with others, helping them shape thoughts, feelings, and signature vibe into song.

The Kinetic Experience works with founders, executives, families, and organizations who want a milestone, a message, or a legacy carried in song rather than in a memo. A company anniversary set down as a piece its people will actually remember. A retirement or a transition marked in a form that outlasts the toast. A family history captured before the last person who remembers it stops being able to. A campaign given a chorus that carries. The lyrics are ours to write. The story stays theirs.

Listen

An American Day, Songs for the Country's 250th Year:

songbox.com/s/anamericanday

Same instrument, three forms

Listen first.

Work with people who are curious.

Trust the ordinary.

A song, a chapter, and a client engagement all begin with what the situation is already trying to say.

My job is to slow down enough to hear it, then to give it a shape that lasts longer than the moment it came from.

Trust the ordinary.

Work with people who are curious.

Trust the ordinary.

Most of what matters in a life or a business does not announce itself. It shows up in kitchens and classrooms, in workshops and front porches, in the meetings that seem routine until you notice the sentence someone almost said. The songs try to honor that. So do the books. So does the consulting.

Work with people who are curious.

I am not interested in slogans, in any of the three rooms. The clients who bring the best out of the consulting, the readers who stay with the books, and the listeners the songs are written for are the ones who arrive curious, who want the thing said plainly and honestly, and who are willing to sit with it long enough for something to shift.

What is The Kinetic Experience

The Kinetic Experience is the umbrella for the lyric and songwriting work. Some of it is my own. Some of it is written for clients who want to hear their thoughts, their milestones, or their message shaped into a form that carries further than a memo. In every case, the lyrics are written line by line. The recordings you will hear are demos, generated to give each song a first voice so the writing can be heard before it moves to a producer or a performer. What is finished is the writing. What is placeholder is everything else.

The catalog includes standalone songs, thematic collections, and, most recently, An American Day: Songs for the Country's 250th Year, an album that spends one day in America, from first light to evening quiet, and pays attention to the ordinary places where the country actually lives.

Other songs sit alongside all of this, written across dozens of genres such as country, indie rock, bossa nova, bluegrass, EDM, and musical theater. Some are personal. Some are commissioned. All of them start in the same place: a line someone overheard, a scene someone noticed, a truth someone wanted to set down before it dispersed.

Alongside my own work, The Kinetic Experience takes on a small number of artist collaborations each year, working with writers, musicians, and other lyricists on the songs they are trying to bring into the world. Sometimes that means a co-write on a song that has been circling in someone's notebook for years. Sometimes it means shaping a story into a lyric that can finally be sung. Sometimes it means finding language for a signature vibe, a mood, a texture, a particular kind of light, that an artist can feel but has not yet gotten onto the page. The work is close, collaborative, and credited plainly. What comes out of it belongs to them.

Why this is on the consulting site

The three practices feed each other, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The books grew out of decades of client work. The songs grew out of the same soil. When clients ask what it means to listen as a discipline, to lead in rhythm, or to build a life the business does not consume, the songs are one of the places those questions get answered. Not in argument, but in melody.

It is also why some clients ask us to help them write their own, because a line sung is a line remembered, and there are truths inside an organization or a life that only travel that way.