The video ingenue: I wrote a song recently, for a project I was working on with some other Soundclick artists (Ron Gragg, ohgrant, JC Carroll, and Mississippi Spud.) I wrote it as a testimony on how love evolves over the course of a lifetime, and yet how it always stays the same. As often is the case, I've kind of wrote it through my own eyes... from the vantage point of how we have become grandparents, and learning that a much loved niece and nephew are getting married next year.

And now, it turns out that this is the first song I've ever done for which there is a video! Not by my doing, but by Country Rose of the Country Rose Show. When I saw the video she made of this song, I am not ashamed to admit I cr...

Rivers of Tears: A lot of my songs are actually my way of practising the meditation technique of St. Ignatius Loyola. This song, my latest, is that kind of meditation:

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/songInfo.cfm?bandID=327734&songID=5447078

Not to go into detail about what Ignatian meditation is, but the gist of it is that you put yourself into scenes of the Bible, and soak in the impression that the scene makes on you.

In "Rivers of Tears", I transfered my own sorrow about the things I've done wrong in my life into the places and scenes of repentance in the New Testament - the woman washing Jesus' feet with her tears; the Prodigal Son returning home, resolved to ask his father if he can be a slave...

Knowing the vintage: A vintner is someone who knows exactly when to harvest the grapes, a brief window between a time when the grapes are too sweet and the time when there is frost.

They know exactly when to put the crushed juice into barrels, and how long to keep the barrels in storage, where the juice ages into wine.

And if they open the barrel, and taste what they have produced, the expert vintner knows exactly when to bottle it, and he also knows if it has turned to vinegar.

So what do you do with the vinegar, then? This is the question. At the moment, I have no answer.

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