My musical history: I started out playing the violin in the sixth grade, and kept that up through college. I decided I wanted to learn the guitar when I was a senior in high school, and went out and bought one for $17 from a pawnshop. I've moved up a little in the guitar world since then (my current mainstay is a Martin D-1R that I just got last year), but the guitar has been my main instrument ever since. I first started writing my own songs after I moved to Hawai'i in 1976-- it was an inspiring place to live, and I've found California to be even more so since I moved here. Lots of impressive scenery, and I've really taken advantage of it. The backcountry is a good place to come up with ideas for songs-- sometimes on nature subjects (under "My Songs", you'll see that I've written some songs about our hiking (mis)adventures, one about John Muir, and one about Yosemite), but more often on other things-- just getting away from traffic, phones, and people gives me more of a chance to think about things to write. Of course, since I can't take my guitar backpacking, I have to remember what I thought of when I get back, but it's usually worked out all right.
Recent developments: I've been writing songs for over 20 years, but I didn't think about getting "serious" about this until 5 or 6 years ago, when I decided to start working on getting my songs out to a wider audience. This Web site, of course, is part of that effort. Other parts of it have included joining songwriting associations (NCSA and NSAI, to which there are links in this section), exchanging information with songwriters farther away by e-mail, snail mail, e-mail lists, Usenet newsgroups, and personal Web sites (there are links to quite a few of these here, also-- and I'm always looking for more-- if you've got a site relevant to songwriters, e-mail me to set up an exchange of links).
The songs on this site: Under "My Songs" and some of the other headings below, you'll find complete lyrics to all the songs I've been able to post here so far. You'll notice, under the sections about other songwriters, some of their songs have the original title with a "++" added, to indicate that I've made some changes or additions (yes, I'll admit it, I'm a computer programmer, and my usual language is C++). I would appreciate any opinions (good, bad, or ugly) that you can offer about any of the songs-- especially if you've got an idea about how to make it a better song (and improvements are almost always possible, even in the best of songs-- you'll see my attempts at that in the sections on other singers and songwriters). Any suggestions that I like well enough to use will be given due credit on these pages; and for all of them, you'll have my sincere gratitude. So let me hear from you.
Sound Samples: Some songs (designated by an asterisk (*) after the title),
include sound samples, so you can get some idea of how they're
supposed to sound. Each sound-sample selector has a description
of where it comes from in the song, its length (in minutes and
seconds), and its size in kilobytes, so you can decide if you
want to take the time to download it before you start. To
minimize download times, and disk space on the Web server, these
samples are all compressed in RealAudio format (file type "ram").
You can get the current version of the RealAudio player for your
computer (for free) from the RealMedia Web site, if you don't
already have it.
Questions? Comments? Please send e-mail to jbearden@ieee.org
Material Copyright © 1998-2003 by Jim Bearden