Dan Tappan – Songs and Music, Old and New
Monday, July 19, was the nineteenth anniversary of the loss of the great songwriter Dave Carter (August 13, 1952 – July 19, 2002).
On July 20, I played a two song tribute to Dave at the Club Passim Virtual Open Mic, consisting of:
I put together a couple of autumn related songs: my own song “Only Autumn Knows” and the standard “Autumn Leaves“, and tried it out at the PCA Open Mike in Westford on October 27.
I recently learned that my song Thought I Knew (video, lyrics) won an Honorable Mention in the March/April 2019 American Songwriters Lyric Contest
In January 2018, inspired by a bit of tweeted Presidential Poetry, I composed a verse to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan‘s I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General (from The Pirates of Penzance), and tweeted it. Later, I composed another verse and tweeted that. Jim Infantino[*] was inspired by those and tweeted several additional verses. Some other local songwriters followed suite. Over the next few days I composed a couple of concluding verses.
The following is the complete collection of verses as submitted, with credits. The first part is my preferred set of verses, but feel free to substitute any of the “Alternate Fact Verses” if you like them better.
[*] Jim dubbed the song “The Pirates of Pence’s Pants” – I prefer the more archaic spelling.
A seasonal song. I wrote this at the tail end of the winter of 2015 (the winter that the Boston area got 108 inches of snow). However, it’s relevant to any winter with snow, so I like to pull it out around February/March. This is a video of a performance at the Club Passim Open Mic on March 9, 2017.
https://youtu.be/2_G2T9KG8eE&w=512
Over President’s Day weekend I attended the 2017 WUMB Winter Acoustic Music Weekend, and had the pleasure of having Jackie Damsky accompany me on violin on one of my songs (Abraham).
https://youtu.be/iFGhiovJigg&w=512
On January 22, 2017 I was the featured performer (1/2 hour set) at the PCA Open Mike in Westford MA.
The setlist was:
Video of the full feature:
https://youtu.be/hU4Fh4bEX3I&w=512
On December 22, 2016, Club Passim put on a “12 Hour Open Mic” as part of their year-end fundraising effort. I performed a four song set, consisting of:
As long as I’m posting demo recordings of recent songs, this is a live recording (at WUMB SAMW) of “Follow the Butterfly”, a tribute to the late, great, songwriter Dave Carter. This was written as an assignment in a songwriting workshop with Bob Franke.
I probably should have posted this a week ago to honor Dave’s birthday on August 13.
(Lyrics)
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I realized the other day that I have about two dozen songs that have never been recorded, and many that have rarely, or never, even been played out. So I’ve been working on putting together a home recording studio, with the goal of having a setup to allow me to make demo recordings with minimal effort. As part of that process I am working on forcing myself to put demos out there even if they aren’t totally perfect.
In furtherance of that goal 🙂 : this a demo recording of the most recent song I’ve written. The last couple weeks of July, I attended a songwriting workshop at the Passim School of Music, taught by Dietrich Strause and Genna Nethercott. This song was my homework.
(Lyrics)
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