{"id":1308,"date":"2015-01-14T17:19:30","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T17:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/?p=1308"},"modified":"2015-01-14T20:13:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T20:13:37","slug":"the-wood-block-song-the-npr-tiny-desk-contest-tinydeskcontest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/?p=1308","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;wood block&#8221; song &#038; The NPR Tiny Desk Contest. #tinydeskcontest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\">NPR<\/a> has just informed me that my song &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rqyZM4DApys\" target=\"_blank\">wood block<\/a>&#8221; is an official entrant into <a href=\"http:\/\/tinydeskcontest.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\">Tiny Desk Contest<\/a>. I am obviously thrilled to be involved. They have asked that I post a little more about the song. I am glad to oblige here.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rqyZM4DApys\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In December, I received a message from a friend telling me about the <a href=\"http:\/\/tinydeskcontest.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\">NPR Tiny Desk Contest<\/a>. I promised to do her proud. I set about recording various new songs I&#8217;ve written this year, just to test them out and see how they&#8217;d sound. At the end of the session, I decided to try out &#8220;wood block&#8221;, a song I&#8217;d been working on for awhile, but never performed or recorded in it&#8217;s entirety.<\/p>\n<p>I started writing &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rqyZM4DApys\" target=\"_blank\">wood block<\/a>&#8221; because it just seems so unnecessary that people still kill each other in this day and age. It frustrated me that it was so hard to write a song that would just chill everyone out and say, hey, that&#8217;s not nice. Let&#8217;s be nice. We&#8217;re all just people, and in some way, we all really like each other. We&#8217;re all being shown a million things every day that promise to make our lives better. For some reason, the thought just popped into my head, &#8220;What if everyone just needs a wood block?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I write songs in various ways. Occasionally, I&#8217;m lucky enough to write three verses and a chorus in one shot and be done with it. But, in many cases, I find a translation which occurs between the head and the pen, where the head&#8217;s honesty fights the pen&#8217;s cleverness for the truth of the song. I always try to focus on that fact that I write songs because I want to remember something about that moment in time. What I remember of what I&#8217;ve written is what matters. That&#8217;s what ends up becoming the song. I often like to think of songs as pieces of pottery in the kiln of your heart. You fire them, you glaze them, you fire them again, then one day you&#8217;re drinking coffee out of them. When they&#8217;re useful, they&#8217;re songs.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Wood block&#8221; took shape over two months. For awhile, it was just a little melody I&#8217;d find myself singing. Then I&#8217;d share bits of it with friends. It was such a personal song, that I didn&#8217;t even want to write any of it down until I was sure I knew where it was headed. I wanted to let my memory write the song, because my memory would be on the hook for singing it again if anyone were to ask.<\/p>\n<p>After reviewing my footage from the day&#8217;s recording, I found the &#8220;wood block&#8221; song had the most I wanted to say\u00a0and remember about being a part of the <a href=\"http:\/\/tinydeskcontest.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\">NPR Tiny Desk Contest<\/a>. There was only one problem. Since I hadn&#8217;t dreamed\u00a0I&#8217;d be using the take, I&#8217;d left my unsightly bedhead showing. Through the magic of the Ken Burns effect on iMovie, I was able crop out most of it and still pan down to show the desk where my typewriter sits. I&#8217;m very glad it was accepted into the <a href=\"http:\/\/tinydeskcontest.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\">NPR Tiny Desk Contest<\/a>. I would like to thank my friend Susanna for telling me about the contest and the folks at <a href=\"http:\/\/npr.org\" target=\"_blank\">NPR<\/a> for helping me to get this song out to the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NPR has just informed me that my song &#8220;wood block&#8221; is an official entrant into Tiny Desk Contest. I am obviously thrilled to be involved. They have asked that I post a little more about the song. I am glad to oblige here. In December, I received a message from[&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1308"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1324,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions\/1324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexbattles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}