I have been trying to find either sheet music or guitar chords for “The Blizzard” for the better end of a year. I finally tracked down the sheet music, but the only way to get it was by buying a now-out-of-print box set that included a CD (full of songs I already have), a memoir (full of stories I’m pretty sure I’ve already heard) and a fold-out poster thingy that contained the sheet music to umpteen songs on a single ginormous sheet. Wildly impractical, and when you find a copy, it’s being sold as a collectible for, like, $60 or something.
Marketing fail.
I finally learned how to play piano by chord and instinct rather than note last winter, so I sat down last week and applied that skill to “The Blizzard.”
It was kind of a roundabout process, but I eventually got there, and the end result was my first-ever contribution to Ultimate-Guitar.com, which is pretty much the greatest website since RoadsideAmerica.com.
I am ridiculously pleased with myself for pulling this off.
The timing was pretty smooth, too: I’ve been kind of chewing on this song for a while, but it didn’t really come together until the other night, and then it took a couple of days for me to get a hand free to write it down, and another day or two for the moderators at UG to approve it.
The roads turned to ice and it started to snow at just about the same time the chords went online.
I can’t decide whether that was God’s little way of creating ambience or just karma paying me back for swiping a song out of thin air. (If it was the latter, somebody probably needs to explain the concept of “fair use” to the Karma Fairy.)
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 