"...Everybody Thinks Their Pitch Is The Perfect Pitch...But This Pitch Really Is...."

Nothing feels as good as lending a helping hand.

Which I am inclined to do.

Momentarily.

First, though...

(Tennessean.com)
Keith Urban is dismantling the way he makes records — and he likes it.

Urban is working with new producers, writing with different songwriters and recording in different studios hoping to make an album unlike anything he’s recorded to date.

So far, it’s working.

“I wanted to have everything around me be totally unfamiliar to me and I think it’s great in a sense that all sorts of stuff is coming out that I normally haven’t done before,” he says.

In particular, Urban is excited about a song he wrote recently with producer Jay Joyce and Jeremy Spillman, both of whom are new co-writers for the singer. He called the writing session “exhilarating” and says it “gave birth to a song that I never would have written with anybody else melodically and in a lot of other ways, too.”

Urban says he has accrued six or seven songs in the past several months, and that so far the music is hopeful but offers fans something new and with insight into his past.

“The song (I wrote with Joyce and Spillman) is a bit of my journey over the last six years, my transition,” he says. “I have it represented in there and I like it because it got represented in a song that’s otherwise pretty upbeat, and I didn’t think that would be the place for that kind of lyric, but it works.”

As for when the new music will be on store shelves, Urban says it will likely be sometime next year, and that carving out a handsome chunk of time to make an album is something he’s always wanted to do. This time, however, it was more than just a want.

“It just isn’t easy to do,” he says. “But it just feels very, very strong in me to do it. I am putting a tour on next year, but it won’t be early in the year, so there is somewhat of a need for an album sooner than later. But I just would like for the album to be right.

“We can’t keep remaking the same record.”


Change is good.

And in my ongoing effort to be a part of the solution, I have a pitch idea for Keith.

Here's a pretty clever song that was recorded some years ago by a Capitol Records group called The Ranch. It was going to be their "next single" but, as fate and the song biz would have it, the label decided to focus more on the lead singer of the group and put their time and energy and money into his career.

So, the group ended and the "next single" meandered up to 60 or so on the chart and then withered away in the wind of career change.

Hey, kids, this is the NFL. Shake it off, take a shower and get on with the game.

Reading about Keith's new direction, though, it occurred to me that this song might just be right up his alley.

It's not like anything he's done in recent years.

And I'm pretty sure he could nail it.

After all, he sounds an awful lot like the lead singer of The Ranch.

Guy named Keith Urban.

"...Why.....So........Seriousssss?????...."

Apparently, conformity doesn't suit me.

Some years ago, I named one of my LLC's, "Outside The Box Multimedia". Not so much because I felt like my work was going to be a cut above, et al (although, of course, one can always hope), but more because I seem to have spent the lion's share of my adult years operating just outside the box of conventional wisdom, etc.

I have been feeling that coloring outside the lines sense pretty strongly today.

It was inspired, or triggered as the case may be, by the passing today of three notable music talents.

Bassist Bob Babbitt.

Deep Purple's co-founder Jon Lord.

And country music pioneer Kitty Wells.

Facebook, in particular, has been saturated all day with reactions to these three deaths, almost all of those postings either literally using, or expressing feelings in terms of, the word "sad".

As in, "sad news", "very sad", "such sadness", ad nauseum.

This is where I personally wander off down the road less traveled.

Maybe it's because my own life certainly has a lot less years left in it than years already lived and I'm subliminally trying to brace my own self for the inevitable surly bonds of earth slipping, but I gotta be honest with ya, kids, I'm just not feeling a lot of sadness at the news of these three nice folks shuffling on ahead.

Obviously, I'm not such a clod that I don't understand that their loved ones are feeling the loss and that, primally, sadness is one of the gamut of emotions that wash over one in that circumstance.

And while there really is no specific measure for what constitutes "untimely", the simple truth is that both Babbitt and Lord were in their 70's and had been ill for some time and the remarkable Miss Wells lived to be a feisty 92, so it's not like any or all of them were young, in the primes of their lives and snatched from us by some cruel act or accident.

These were three lives very well lived, beautifully realized, remarkably accomplished and inspiringly spent, three very obvious counterpoints to the contemporary glut of faux celebrity and/or substance soaked tragedies.

So, call me obtuse if you must, but, sincerely, sadness eludes me here.

Celebration, on the other hand, seems very much in order.

Celebration of three lives very well lived, beautifully realized, remarkably accomplihsed and inspiringly spent.

Celebration that, assuming your theology and my theology are walking, at least, alongside each other, three deserving souls have gone on ahead to their rewards and a joy, the understanding of which we politely feign but, let's be honest, gang, which we can't begin to actually comprehend.

In that light, not to mention the light these three left behind, sadness seems a little silly.

Then again, maybe it's just me.

Wandering around over here just outside the box.