How Blues Traveler Writes a Song | John Popper is a pretty cool guy

On the brilliant advice of a friend I posted this past week my old college paper likening Blues Traveler's "The Hook" to a Shakespearean sonnet (#55, for reference). I also tweeted it @Blues Traveler since John Popper had expressed an interest in it. My friend thought he might retweet it and get me some page views. It was a smart move.

Well, John actually got back to me with some fascinating thoughts strung out over the course of ten consecutive tweets, which I've decided to dump for you here so everyone else can get a little insight into how a BT song comes together.

[Note: I've adjusted for tweet separation and spelling errors, but not grammar or style. That's all Popper, baby.]

Wow... I did not know a lot of that!... Intuition led a lot of my feel for respecting & rejecting traditional form intermittently but my desecration of Pachebel was my first aim.

Actually the song was built on the premise of my older brother mentioning that I use too many words in a verse... So my aim was to do the first two verses "normal" & cram way too many into the "3rd" verse (which became the break down).

But the subdivision of rhyme scan into rhyme within a "rhyme" while not perhaps Shakespear's brand of gin, is a practice as old as the hills... Especially with lymrics or iembic scans...actually rap does it alot... But I'd wager most devises have been effected by the Bard... & certainly his ability to take what had come before & innovate is a trademark of every innovater I aspire to...Bob Marley didn't do alot of the "reggae" things we now associate with a genre we give him credit for inventing. Likewise Hendrix broke many of his own rules of the new guitar style he himself was establishing... I expect no less from arguably the greatest master of the english language ever.. But I was really impressed with that report & must now track down sonnet #55... Thanx for that... ;)

For the record, that is two winky faces John Popper has tweeted me.

Your move, Everyone Else Trying to Feel Cool.

Amy Winehouse Is Now Immortal

Say what you want about her vocal inflections, substance abuse, or orthodonture, Amy Winehouse made sure to die tragically young, and every loves tortured artists who die before their time.

What's more, if Winehouse had the choice of when to go out early, she really couldn't have picked a better opportunity; she snuck in 6 weeks under the wire and ensured her place in The 27 Club.

The "27 Club" is a collection of the super-famous, typically exclusively detailing great musicians, who all coincidentally died at age 27. Prominent members include Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Dave Alexander of The Stooges, The Grateful Dead's "Pigpen," and a "statistical spike" of other musicians from multiple backgrounds and genres.

The Lord did not end up buying her a Mercedes Benz.
However, she did get a pretty sweet Porsche.

 Also, Spike Spiegel from anime Cowboy Bebop, but he's A) fictional, B) was designed to be 27, and C) isn't definitively dead because fans love the ambiguity.

"Bang."

Amy Winehouse now gets to be tragic and young and remarkable forever. She will never tour as a washed-up Brit pushing her pathetic wanker of a 7th album. She will never appear in tabloids looking hideous or being criticized for not losing her baby weight two weeks after giving birth. She will never even crack under the pressure of her own success and stringent personal motivations. No critic will ever have an opportunity to deplore her later works as lesser than her early career. She will never fade away.

Amy Winehouse gets to be canonized into Rock Sainthood.