I've been a lot of things in my life--starving artist, ad guy, creative director for big entertainment corporations, creator and producer of TV shows, freelance writer.  But deep down all along, the real-est me has always been a songwriter.  

I've had some success in that arena.  Bette Midler covered one of the songs I wrote with my sometime partner Peggy Sarlin. It's called "I Regret Everything" and is a send-up of Edith Piaf's famous Je ne regret rien. Our song was pretty darn funny, if I do say so myself. It brought down the house in big arenas all over the world as part of Bette's "Divine Miss Millennium" tour. And it's been covered by about twenty singers, including the amazing Patti Lupone. So that's cool.  I also recently got the call from Bette to adapt my song "Life Is Still Very Wow" into an opening number for her new Vegas act.  My songs have been covered by some of the world's greatest obscure folk singers. (My favorite people in the world.  The Great Unknown...you'll get to meet some of them here at the SongMine.)  And I've written songs and comic material for Tim Curry, Rodney Dangerfield, Wayne Brady, George Segal, Fred Flintstone, Pebbles, Bamm Bamm, Woody Woodpecker and Casper the Friendly Ghost, to name but a few.

As a TV show creator I've always built songs into my shows.  My cartoon show ChalkZone was one of Nickelodeon's highest rated hits in the early '00's, and every episode had at least one of my songs...sometimes two or three. I'll be posting them now and then in The Digs.  I also wrote the script, music and lyrics for Nick's feature length animated musical The Electric Piper, and composed the theme song and special music for about ten episodes of Oh Yeah, Cartoons!  My musical episode of Cartoon Network's Cow And Chicken was nominated for an Annie award, and I wrote a lot of other special songs for that show as well.  

As an advertising guy I wrote a score of jingles, and a jingle of scores for products like STP and the now long gone Pan Am Shuttle. 

I'm proud of everything I've done (well, almost) but through all those incarnations I have always perceived myself as first and foremost a laborer in the Song Mines, alongside countless others struggling to make melodies wrap around rhymes and say something true.  And that's why I've started this Mlog--Bill Burnett's SongMine...as a place where I can show my work and the work of others I admire and respect.  The Hitocracy is dead.  We are now ruled by Webiscite. (For more on this radical theory, visit the Welcome page and look for my essay down at he bottom of the page.)

Please go watch some videos or listen to some songs...and have a good time in the SongMine!

Billllllll

PS:  For an overview of my creative career, visit billburnett.com.  It's a great site, but you have to promise to come back here afterwards.  The SongMine is where the action is!