Oh, for more time!!

Many New Songs On The Way

Just a very quick update on some forthcoming projects:

• Tristan Spencer - I'm busy co-writing Tristan's debut album. We're 7 songs in, so far, and have another 6 tracks we've penned for other artists to cover (4 female, 2 male). Check four of our songs here: http://www.myspace.com/tristspencer
• Rolf and Keeley - I've written 6 Country Rock songs with Rolf Schnyder in Switzerland http://www.myspace.com/swisssongwriterduo. Rolf won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the Country Section this year, so I'm hugely honoured to be working with him. We've got the very talented Keeley Camilleri recording these six tracks and we'll be promoting those as soon as they are produced up and mixed.
• Isham - in a funk/R&B/Urban direction, I'm writing more tracks for Isham. Watch this space: Isham

I've signed publishing on four more songs:
Attention (Dance/Pop) and Give My Heart A Chance (Pop) (Both co-written with Tristan), a Latino song (Let The Night Burn) and an R&B track called Do Love. Top-line melodies and lyrics for the last three of these were by yours truly.

I will get round to uploading snippets onto the LYRICO website at some point soon! When I get time!

All the best for now,

Chris

So Good They Named It Twice?

Wow, what a crazy five or six weeks I've had! I'm 'cream crackered'! Paris, Boston, New York, Berlin and Birmingham! (Yeah, maybe the last one isn't quite as exciting... no disrespect to Brum - my Dad's from there - but it really didn't hold the same magic as 9 days in the US!)

Boston & Blue Skies

Travel can be such a bl**dy fiasco, can't it? I set off from the hotel in Boston at 1:00 PM on Thursday 11th and got to the airport with around 3 hours to spare... just in case. Good thing, 'cause I found my flight to Newark, New Jersey, had been cancelled but luckily (or so I thought at the time) they checked me in on an earlier flight. Then notices started to appear on the displays that this one was now delayed. After finally boarding, the plane just sat on the tarmac for another 90 minutes waiting to get a take off slot. When we finally got airborne I realised it was going to be touch and go about making my connection to Birmingham (and no... that wasn't my visit to Birmingham, I was there again a week or so later!) In fact, as we landed in Newark and taxied in I could see a Continental 757 pulling away from a gate... I hoped it wasn't mine, but despite the mad dash (treating slow moving people in the way with the sort of respect a bowling ball shows 10 standing pins), I found the gate closed and the gentleman behind it informing me of what I was now painfully aware of... I'd missed my flight back! (And I've never done that before in all my years of travelling!)

The Continental 'help' desk (inverted commas for a good reason!) gave me a couple of choices: going to France a few hours later then flying out from Paris the following afternoon to Birmingham; or staying over locally and repeating the attempt to jet off to Birmingham direct, just 24 hours later from the flight I'd missed. I chose the latter and was given a voucher for a hotel at the airport. Great I said, but what about my bags? (For a change of clothes etc.) "Oh, if you want your luggage, I'll key into the computer to get them sent through. Just go down two floors to baggage reclaim and they'll guide you..." I duly did this and sat in front of Carousel 9 waiting for my case. Nothing for 45 minutes, so I went back to baggage reclaim where I was told it can take an hour. Half an hour later I went back to the desk, and was told it was going to be two... "Just wait another hour". Nothing. After three hours the local yanks got a taste of some pure Anglo Saxon vocabulary! I was then told by the new person on the desk that as I had requested the bag after 7PM it would NOT be dispatched and was now in a storage hold awaiting tomorrow's flight. More Anglo Saxon vocabulary. (Sorry, but I'd sat there like a lemon for three hours having been completely misinformed by the so called 'help team'. I was also very tired and hungry!) So, without luggage, I then took the shuttle bus to my hotel only to find that by now all the rooms were taken! ("we didn't think you were coming, Sir.") Argghhh! The receptionist made a call and I was told another bus would take me (and the collection of other unfortunates) to an alternative hotel that DID have rooms. After trying to board two busses that said Holiday Inn (ah, but not to MY Holiday Inn), eventually a minibus arrived and drove us all to some Newark suburb called Carteret... A Holiday Inn Motel right next to the 14 lane New Jersey Turnpike with hot and cold running trucks rumbling through the night completely free of charge!

Anyway, all's well that ends well, because after some business on Friday morning, I found myself with four or five hours to kill before my flight check-in. Looking at a map, I realised that the turnpike headed all the way into New York, so a few minutes later I got a bus and an hour later was in Manhattan charging up 8th Avenue towards Central Park, then heading down 5th counting the 'Wests' down from 57 to 34 for a quick jaunt up to the top of the Empire State Building! Wow! Absolutely fantastic it was too! (Though somewhat of a 'brown trouser job' for people like me who suffer from vertigo!!)

Manhattan from the Empire State Building as the clouds roll in

I no doubt ended up shedding pounds (of sweat, I hasten to add!!) in my three hour mad-dash, just getting back in time on the bus to flag the courtesy airport shuttle down... I know I can cut things fine, but it was leaving 10 minutes early, damn it! So, I've 'accidentally' got to see a little of New York as well as loads of Boston! Boston, by the way, was superb... a fantastic place! I had two free days at the start (as I was working Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday) so I walked the red-brick 2.5 mile Freedom Trail, went on the USS Constitution "Old Ironsides" (the oldest still commissioned warship in the world, launched in the 1797), drank beers in Cheers (yes, it's a real pub!), and The Bell In Hand (the oldest pub in America) and on Saturday took a bus out to Cape Cod...

I'll write about Berlin when I've got my Breath back...

All the best,

Chris

Busy, busy, busy…

Just a quick update… There are at least three new Publishing Deals being signed: Summer Love is being sent on a two year vacation (and hopefully longer) with our faithful friends Leopard Music since the track has became available to us again (mercifully!). I’m also signing two new co-writes with Andy McNeil to the same publisher, namely the R&B/Urban Do Love and the up-beat Latino track Let The Night Burn.

When I get time to work out what week, month and year it is, I’ll post MP3 clips on the Lyrico website so you can get a teaser of these two new tracks.

Offers on three more tracks (co-written with Tristan Spencer) have come in from the US, but we’re still under negotiation there…

All the best,

Chris

7 New Songs on MySpace

Just a quick note because I realise I haven't posted anything this month so far... and I'm running out of time to do it. So in typical 'lastminute.com' fashion (yes, I have been nicknamed that at times!) here is a quick update...

I've been hugely busy with the following writing projects... please check them out:

I'm co-writing an album for Tristan Spencer and the first four songs are now on his MySpace site: http://www.myspace.com/tristspencer Please check them out. We've recently just received a publishing offer from a major Nashville Publisher for Too Late. Fantastic news!

Niamh's CD demo co-written with Torgeir Bjordal of Fuelled Productions and recorded at YFM Bergen is now launched and there is already interest from a major label. Again, great news!
http://www.myspace.com/niamhegan

I've been working on a new R&B track and a Latino song with Andy McNeil. Both are being produced up now. Watch this space for further news on those.

Tristan and I are working on dance/pop songs for a girl band (name to be disclosed if we get the contract!).

Promise I'll write more soon... And make it funny next time! Do check out my main two sites and link in if you can.

http://www.lyrico.co.uk/ & http://www.myspace.com/chrisbreenlyricist

All the best,

Chris

A SoundClick Urban Chart Number 1!

Three months ago I wrote a top-line (melody-line and lyrics) to an urban/R&B backing track that Isham Bachir, a new artist in Switzerland, sent me. The track, Body Beautiful, has now been recorded by Isham and is being produced up at studios internationally. (At least two different versions are expected... possibly three. Can't wait!)

The first of these finished masters Isham has placed on SoundClick (which is like MySpace but JUST for music... no hairbrush divas and other nonsense). It's global and has charts in various genres.

Isham emailed me at the end of last week to say that Body Beautiful had been submitted to the Urban Charts and out of 57,065 songs had reached number 1! Please click on the link to hear Body Beautiful... Feel free to vote/post a comment. We'd love to hear from you.


On a totally different note, just to prove that ol' Chris Breen here, can write lyrics and top-lines in very (even extremely!) diverse genres of music (no pigeon holes here!!), Hey Old Friend, a traditional country song has been featured on pod radio broadcasts 'State Side'. This track started out as a backing track that came across to me from Actor, Singer and Musician Paul Gelsomine in Norway. I wrote a top-line and then Paul adapted that to suit his voice and style. Please check out the links below to hear that song... What d'you mean you can't dance to it?

Hey Old Friend

Please check out my Lyrico website and if you're a composer/songwriter needing a co-writer, you'll find a very wide spread of styles I work in there from pensive, introspective ballads, sexy Urban/R&B, chart-style/commercial songs, power-pop, indie, rock, dance, country & country rock, jazz, musicals...

Speak soon.

All the best,

Chris

Cyprus Writing Session...

Just got back from Cyprus and experienced rather freak weather conditions... well for me, anyway, 'cause the weather was great! I expected stair rods (well, that was what I got on the last writing trip/holiday to Kefalonia in September!), but, despite being fooled into thinking my usual luck was in (it was raining when I arrived and water was dripping in through the ceiling of my hotel room... Oh yes!), it stopped after an hour and then hardly a cloud all week. In fact Cyprus was rumoured to have had the warmest weather in January since 1976! I've come back doing my best impersonation of a Chippendale mahogany sideboard. Dark brown all over... with bowed legs!?

Talking of bow legs, I ended up staying in a hotel that was like Club 80 -130! There were only 3 of us under 50 there! One old boy had a 'blowout' on his walking stick at the breakfast buffet and ending up falling into the tray of scrambled egg! Well, he ended up submerging his elbow into it anyway. What made it even funnier (see, unfortunately I've got a cruel streak!) was he was wearing a mustard coloured cardigan and was oblivious to the fact that he was covered in the stuff! I think he wore the scrambled egg all day... not advisable in a freak heat wave. (Unless it was a clever tactic to get a table to himself in the evening, of course!)

I actually wrote LOADS of lyrics whilst away and am now busily starting to edit them and type everything up. I've pretty much finished tracks for the musical... I also paved the way for loads more dance stuff, working on around 20-30 lyrics for various projects. I did hire a jeep and spent three days touring the island... catching up on the writing in the evenings.

When I've downloaded the photos I might post a couple here.


Please keep checking out tracks on the sites:

www.lyrico.co.uk

www.myspace.com/chrisbreenlyricist

www.songwriter-lyricist.com

All the best,


Chris

A New Year - A New Website...

With typical 'New Year Resolve', I've bundled together all my sketched-out ideas and pages for a new site (it's just one of many, so think of it as the entrance hall to a cyber-space mansion of the future... well, you've got to think big, haven't you? An entrance hall to a clapped-out caravan doesn't have the same ring, does it?). Anyway, the hosting was bought at around Noon on New Year's Day from good old 'a small orange' in Atlanta, Georgia and the site went live at about 9.00 PM UK time on the 2nd January.

So why have I waited until now to announce it to the world? Well, that's a long story... Are you sitting comfortably? (Visions of Ronnie Corbett and a somewhat rambling tale... "Anyway, as I was saying"... Actually, I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say..." Stop it, Chris!)

Anyway, I decided to buy another 7 domains before launching this site (see, it's an eight roomed caravan already!) and that's when the problems started. Honestly, it was easier buying my house... though, mercifully, the domains were somewhat cheaper! Anyway, it's all sorted, so wipe your feet on the welcome mat and take a look round my new cyberspace caravan...

All the best,

Chris

www.songwriter-lyricist.com
www.lyrico.co.uk
www.myspace.com/chrisbreenlyricist
www.sundancesongs.com