Time flies! It’s already March of 2013. The last time I made a blogpost seems like eons ago, apologies for my long absence. I am currently putting the finishing touches on producing an animal/doggy song for one of my pledgers, who had specially requested to have a song written for his wife’s upcoming birthday. His wife is a real animal lover and he asked that I write a song about their five dogs. I finished recording and producing the song last week and Esteban has been hard at work mixing this song. We should be done by the end of today. Thank you Esteban!

In writing this song I adopted a more simple, direct approach, especially with respect to the melodies, chords and lyrics I used, it’s a departure from my usual writing style but one that allows me to embrace a child-like simplicity in song-writing as well as to engage the animal lover in me. Admittedly, I am not a dog lover and writing this song has thus been a challenge as well as an eye-opener for me: I have had to put myself in the shoes of someone who really loves dogs.

In order to aid my imaginative process, I read up on articles written by pet and dog owners and tried to recall what the many dogs we used to have in my childhood and early teenage years used to be like. Some thoughts and insights have stayed on with me. One insight, in particular that stuck out to me  is that to open yourself up to loving and truly caring for a dog is to expose yourself  to heartache and grief, because their life-span rarely exceeds 10 years.

In spite of us having dogs when I was younger, sadly, I have never known what it is to truly love and care for a dog. And while I have always gravitated more towards cats, I am unfortunately, allergic to them: within a few minutes of being exposed to cat hair, I get red and itchy and I start to sneeze.

Apart from dogs, we also had cats at home when I was younger. The only reason why keeping cats wasn’t a serious health-risk for me back then was because they rarely spent time at home, preferring to roam the streets instead from morning till night, only to return for dinner and a warm place to sleep. Like my father put it, they treated our home like, “a hotel.” Still, I often ended up with red eyes and rashes after each time I played with our cats.

I don’t know if I will ever keep pets again, but instead of pets, I am now keeping plants: I have developed a fondness for succulents or ‘fat plants’ as they are sometimes called. They are easy to look after, very affordable and to top it off, they’re quiet and very pretty. Here’s a picture of my fatties. They certainly bring a smile to my face whenever I see them. 🙂