Dan Tappan – Songs and Music, Old and New
I wrote the first draft of this song as a joke, never intending to perform it. But, when I was doing my grocery shopping last week they were already playing Christmas songs. So that inspired me to finish the song. I did wait until after Thanksgiving to record it
Lyrics (a few edits since the recording)
ZoomForChristmasThis was written for a song-writers-in-the-round, based on a prompt chosen by the previous month’s audience: “Penny In The Well”
This was written for a songwriters-in-the-round, at the Serendipity Cafe in Maynard MA, December 11, 2019. One of the rounds had to be a new song, written for the occasion, based on a prompt selected by the previous month’s audience. This month the prompt was “Claire is leaving!”.
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.
Here’s the latest song I’ve been working on, I played it out at the PCA Open Mike in Westford on September 8.
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.
This is an older song, but a new video. Performed March 12, 2017 at the PCA Open Mike, in Westford MA, as part of a special tribute evening to local singer/songwriter/promoter/all-around-good-person Ellen Schmidt.
(Lyrics)
https://youtu.be/Q6Zd9zQLPMQ&w=512
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