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Songwriting news

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Reunited Dead Ready to Tour Following last weekend's successful Terrapin Station: A Grateful Dead Family Reunion concerts, which attracted more than 30,000 of the group's most ardent followers to the Alpine Valley Music Theater in East Troy, Wisconsin, reps for the legendary jam band have announced that surviving members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart are ready to hit the road together. .
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Vassar Delivers

Piano man Vassar follows up his gold debut with American Child (Arista Nashville), which features 12 songs he co-wrote. Virginia native Phil Vassar made a name for himself as a successful songwriter long before he recorded his first album. Penning hits for Alan Jackson ("Right on the Money"), Collin Raye ("Little Red Rodeo"), Tim McGraw ("For a Little While" and "My Next Thirty Years") and Jo Dee Messina ("I'm Alright" and "Bye, Bye"), Vassar was named ASCAP's songwriter of the year in 1999. Click here for story

Up a Creek - The Band that rings like a bell
WE WANT THINGS TO FIT, LIKE SQUARE PEGS IN square holes. But there are no square holes. There are stones in shoes, bumps in roads, clouds in skies. It rains and pours, and each drop triggers a drum, a fretless bass, a guitar hero, a fiddle, a tuba, a brass band, otherworldly organs, three singers so earnest they sound as if they're pleading for their lives. It's like a Disneyland treatment of Deliverance -- three hicks singing "It's a small world after all" in such a way that you can't tell when one member of the trio lets off and the next one starts. Click here for story

John Fogerty Plans "Dream Record"
There's a good moon rising for John Fogerty, who has a new baby, a new record label and a new album in the works. The former leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival has signed with DreamWorks Records, which is run by Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker, the team that helped orchestrate Fogerty's 1985 comeback album, Centerfield. Click here for story

Daly No Longer Singing the Blues About Golf
"I play a little guitar, I suck at it but it's fun to play," said Daly, now addicted to guitars, with 47 in his growing collection. "It's really neat to sit down with Johnny Lee (Hooker) and Hootie (and the Blowfish) and them and write songs. "I've really gotten more involved in music. I sing with my heart, I know I'm probably out of tune but it's what everyone wanted. "I know I'm not a singer but people tell me the songs that I wrote are definitely about my life. They are all songs about what has happened in my life." Click here for story

My dreams are coming true
Kenny Chesney is getting ready to release his seventh album to coincide with his current sold-out tour and the album's first single, "Young," which holds the Number Two spot on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart. No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems represents a more mature Chesney, who has come a long way from his days in East Tennessee where he dreamed of being a singer. Chesney says that while he may have moved up from being in the audience to being on the stage, he really hasn't changed as a person. Click here for story

Jo Dee Messina writing for new CD
"You put me in a room with a songwriter, and I don't know this person--forget it," she says. "You'll never get anything out of me 'cause I'm just terrified. It's like I'm treading on someone else's turf. It's like I'm the outsider there, you know? I have been doing a lot of writing by myself or else I'll grab somebody who can play an instrument that I know really well. We're working on a bunch of different things. Of course, if they have ideas for movies and such we'll throw them in there. I haven't been asked to do that yet, though." Click here for story

Vassar Delivers
Up a creek
Writing for new CD

Songwriting basics
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Stay out of the corner
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Now what with my song?
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