he's piqued my curiosity with the songs that he writes and we're going to talk a little bit about the san francisco music scene in how alan became part of it alan how are you doing more right now are you  so when did you start coming to the open mike scene in san francisco came to san francisco after having been in the open mike scene with k c turner opened an open mike up there that i had started going to because i lived up there but he enticed me to go down to the red devil daunting for me i have to say i as an older person and young crowd down there but i went and you've been a musician pretty much all your life i guess the writing songs and so i was sixteen and your major axes piano organ or well i started on guitar pianos where i play mostly now keyboard and you've got your own to for your songs is it a melody that comes to mind is a subject matter is a combination of all that what do you go through let me explain the way i wrote the common way that i write a song is that i usually write the bridget the bridge and last verse of a song first it's the usual starting place is i've got some small melodic idea in my mind i write a couplet of wronging some rhyme somewhere it ends up being in either the bridge or the last first and after i've written the bridge of the last verse i know where i have to get to with the song then i go back write the first and second verse of the song that's my most common way of writing and when it comes to subject matter is almost always a bad out relationships it's sometimes about my relationships sometimes directly about me and sometimes it's fictionalized as almost character studies about other people and their relationships there's lots of reasons for being songwriters  songs for me it's really about well you know i did when we talked about the songwriting process the rest of it is i write songs and then spend years parsing them to figure out what i meant by them and i just cover who i am through that process and i'm also trying to communicate something you know the nicest compliment i ever had for one of my songs was when somebody said to me your songs leave enough space for me and my own experience to very interesting i thought they were too personal for that i thought oh it's talking about very personal things or what about have you recorded a lot of your stuff i mean the process of recording stuff and just strange you should mention it any i've come doing to e p i assume i have about five songs on it each one is being handled by different producer people i've met have offered me these opportunities to yeah i'd like to produce a song for you so these are all of like five different five year friend studios five different superior  why don't you tell me about how them musical community gets together not only at a musical of events but they go out for coffee once a week and and share what they're doing the local music north bay i met them through that jesse brewster for instance is the tommy castro came by sammy and you're the guy who founded big brother mallory and he was he is an artist and his work was find out what people are doing but it's not very structure on sometimes this is like hot topics like i'm like the week that michelle shocked did what she did in you know that was a topic hour or so to be topics or to do or when when the mood when george israel been up there you know there was an important topic and there are other offshoot coffees k z turner still has a weekly coffee in san francisco and it's just music of people we've talked about show up at this at more of the other of the of these coffees which is hank have important discussions about how to do promotion and how to add how to promote the scene and all sorts of things like that but  so what about some of the other people that have offered to record you scott nicholson fat opie that opie yeah and how did you know you know him i know he through oh also through the open mike scene in marin before we got to before we got to over what was originally casey's open mike at max's deli and dennis is in your band dennis is in my band and dennis managed and dennis manages the open mike at the nova so you've been connected since you were over and by all means these are people you know scott nichols these are all local jeff campbell these are the people i look up to these are ginger bronson these are the people i look up to and who i advise people listen to when people are always telling me all this go see this big banner that big band and i'm like you know what i'd rather go see some people i know who i could say hello to after the gig and tell them i'm there to support them in some big band they don't know me i don't know them i mean i can appreciate you know to the level that they've got but there's no real connection between me and the band you know whereas i go see you know to go see you or donovan and you know we have a connection and you know and you'll see you'll stop and have a little conversation with me if you have some time oh well i mean you have  those conversations it's like that's what it's about that's what the scene is about for me is like the connections that people patients to what they're doing and i should mention to that what you were saying puts me in mind of the blog entry that i made called i stopped listening to national commercial music in me and i can always name you somebody locally who i like better know well i have i have more fun you know going out and seeing local people and yeah i would compare some local artist particular songs to anybody  and met a lot of new people there and now it's kind of semi every other month something that the cafe du nord and a pop up we like to say something that doesn't happen regularly but will pop up from time to time  yeah a lot of the people i think most people it actually came from the red devil and everybody lot of the open makes you go inside me maybe you'll throw your name in a hat or something like that  the new papa or whatever was going on at the red devil you would stand in line for two hours or something to anybody and yeah depending upon how early you had to get there you spend a lot of time in line talking to the other musicians and actually getting to know them yeah quite a bit not only get to know yeah we that it was golden time for bonding we that's what makes us of the what made us a community i think is the time online because you had an event you don't get you can't talk while people are playing or you can't you can't talk affectively in a bar but that time online beforehand golden for bonding with people yeah and we did yeah and i've seen you play with a number of different people so you you're kind of hit man they go alone we need to we're going to be playing this gig and just wouldn't be great if we had like keyboards and hey what about al and yeah i call him up lucky me that so many people are willing to do that i  mean they tell me that i do it well because i do it minimally that must be it i can i can't do it any more than minimally but apparently that works and to it it should be fairly said there are any number of people in the scene who are all about collaboration and who are ready to a moment's notice to go out to somebody else's game play with them or did join up and there is a lot of collaboration in the scene i know people who have studios who want they'll find someone in the scene they really like and want to help them record or are doing or as we were talking earlier some of the open mikes have cover your friends song night and those are those are fantastic because you get to you get to take some one song that you really like and then play it your way and a lot of times people already come back and go wow as you said when you do some of their songs they say wow i never even knew that i had that in my song until i her and you do it this is why i do it doesn't take much convincing i encourage people to seriously listen to each other's music that's what we need to do in the community we really can take the time to listen to each other's music get to know it take it and make it our own yeah lesser that's how you learn that's for sure  think well it's been a pleasure talking with you alan the pleasure is mine and if you ever get a chance to see alan monash his band or him by himself or maybe him backing up another group