208: Mike Errico

Mike Errico’s new book Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter is about songwriting, and the life of the songwriter. 

Errico teaches songwriting at NYU, Yale and Wesleyan. He’s a serious thinker, and a serious talker. But he’s also a musician - he came of age in a music business that no longer exists, where a young songwriter could get signed to a contract on the strength of a handful of acoustic songs that played well in downtown coffee shops and song circles at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street. And that’s what happened to him - he was signed, sealed and delivered, fed to the lions and spit back out, and along the way he made a whole bunch of records, wrote a whole bunch of songs, and developed his approach both to writing and to teaching song craft. 

We spoke recently about his own personal story, as well as the book. In our talk we considered such questions as “what is a song?”, what is means to make something non trivial and undeniable, the important distinction between how things act versus what they are, the fallacy of Art, the search for timelessness, what is melodic math, and what do Ani DiFranco, The Beatles, Billie Eilish, or McDonalds have to do with any of it.

Talking to Mike Errico, October 2021

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon and following the podcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.