Curt Siffert's Bits and Pieces

At about the time his daughter turned five, a buddy of mine started telling her goodnight stories. Except, this guy grew up reading comic books, so his idea of telling goodnight stories was to tell her the story of Darth Vader, and of Superman. There was something about that that I thought was so funny, and kind of touching too. So that eventually turned into this song.

This new version of the song is probably the last one until the cd. This has drums and upright bass and is closer to my overall concept for the song. Some great energy provided by Scott Townsend on drums and Chris Gustafson on upright bass. Previous versions of the song can be found in the Bone Yard .

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This is actually the first song I've ever written, and I'm not sure why it's taken me this long to post it. I wrote this for In The Buff , the a cappella group I co-founded when I was in college. I hear about this tune popping up from time to time, apparently others have used it or sung it in other competitions. The guys did a great job recording it for having limited studio time. I've always always been enamored with the idea of redoing it for big band. Pete Wright sings lead on this.

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On 11/11/06 I wanted to see if I could write a song in less than an hour. The first draft took 45 minutes. The piano line was partially inspired from one of my piano improvs, Small Town Sunday . Lyrics were free-written. Lately I've been pulling it out again when playing with my trio, and I'm liking the new sound - this is a recent recording that I think is an improvement on the version I had here before (now located in the Bone Yard .

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I don't really know how to describe what this one is about, but I'm interested in hearing how it comes across, so leave comments or contact me. This one was another one-nighter - I seem to have better success with the songs I write in one night. It was a Saturday night, took about eight hours to get from the appearance of the first piano riff to the first recording where I got through without bobbles. This recording is from after digesting the tune for a couple of weeks.

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I wrote "I Have A Cold" in a couple of hours one night when I started coming down with a cold. I was trying to keep a sense of humor about it before it socked me too bad. Of course, the next few days sucked. Since then I've been adding little touches to it and recording better performances. This will be the final version until I either add other instruments or professionally record it. Previous versions available in the Bone Yard .

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In March I had a rehearsal with two friends of mine, and I pulled out this song to try and get a decent performance of it - I think it turned out pretty well. All Aboard is a song I originally wrote while I visited Nashville for a weekend. It's about how sometimes we follow a path just from simple inertia - what it can be like when we don't take the road less traveled. There's still more to add - I want more backup vocals and maybe a tin whistle solo - but it's starting to come together. Special thanks to Ken and Steve from Quoting Napoleon for helping me out on the recording.

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I wrote this song for my college a cappella group back in 1995. It was actually for a friend who seemed to really need the message of what the lyrics were about. It's interesting to me because the arrangement of the song feels different to me than the song itself, even though at the time this was the only version of the song that existed. Others must have agreed, because the song has actually been redone by people other than me.

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This is about the divorce of a friend of mine. He became aware it was happening while sitting in an empty house they had just bought together.

Of course, it took me a while to finish the song - I had to rush to finish it before he got married again. I ended up finishing it on his wedding day. I later submitted it to a couple of large songwriting contests, where it advanced to the second round both times.

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