Day 5: February 3rd, 2010
Ethan Baird of Pesky J Nixon

Ethan Baird is a pesky fellow. He's a singer songwriter, member of the folk trio Pesky J. Nixon, music composition major, and retired a cappella percussionist. Although mostly he's a mischievous bastard. His performances are fun, funny, thoughtful, compassionate, and immediately intimate.      In the past ten years he has performed at the Lincoln Center, opened up for Pete Seeger, performed for President Bill Clinton, sold out Club Passim and done his best to entertain the heck out of everyone he comes across up and down the east coast.      February is a marked challenge as Ethan plans to complete 14 songs in 28 days all while documenting it on his blog, 14in28.blogspot.com as a fundraiser for Pesky J. Nixon's forthcoming unnamed album (currently codenamed "Nuts"). www.peskyjnixon.com

       So Ethan wrote to me and said let's write a song about a place of worship.  Something like "House of Stone and Light" or Tom Waits' "Come on Up to the House."  I'd never thought about writing a song about a church so I figured why not? 
      I sat down and did my usual stuff.  Drank some tea, ate a cookie.  Did a quick word map where I started with the word curch in the middle.   I did an object write which was fun (I remembering engaging in a fantasy about swinging from the lights of the church like tarzan a lot during mass as a kid) but it wasn't quite where I wanted to go.  Then I started doodling a picture of a church.   Like a lot of people I don't have all great associations with church, but I wanted to write a gospel-y song and it won't do to write gospel song that is down on churches.   The doodling helped though cause I found myself drawing a guy sitting outside the church mediating and somehow that made something click for me.  And thus, this song came out of it.  

Timmy Riordan

Timmy has been called ‘the hidden gem” of the Somerville/Cambridge music scene. In February 2009 he wrote and posted 28 songs on his website. This year he’s doing it again.  He has also decided there should be 8 day in a week (in honor of the Beatles of course) and has invited 32 of his songwriting friends to support him through the month by each writing a song themselves. Over the last summer he recorded 8 of those songs on a CD entitled “Peter Let Me In.” Each CD includes an original cover, hand-drawn just for you in Sharpie by Timmy. Proceeds from this hand-crafted album are all going directed to the making of “New York’s Ignoring Me” his next studio album to be released in summer of 2010.