Mindi Abair may be a hardworking artist — but that doesn’t mean the process of creating music isn’t a whole lot of fun. With the release of her In Hi-Fi Stereo album, the sax diva is giving some insights into her songwriting process.  She told SmoothViews.com that, “For me writing is a social thing. I’ll call up a friend and go “Hey, wanna get breakfast and write a song?”… We get together and…write the song that is in our heads, we write the song that we’re feeling. We listen to old records for inspiration and kind of jam or just start playing… we’ll have a blast and see what comes out.”

What came out for In Hi-Fi Stereo was about 45 songs.  For Abair, paring down the list wasn’t easy: “It took a few weeks. I would put them up against each other and feel out which ones I loved and which ones I just liked. I thought about which ones go together and which ones don’t really fit in. I played them for friends to see what they thought. I’d play them in the car or on the plane and just see which songs I went back to.”

The first single from the album, “Be Beautiful,” originally appeared on United We Cure, a charity CD to raise money for breast cancer research.  It remains one of Abair’s favorites: “That is such a great anthem. It’s full or words people need to hear: believe, belong, be strong, be beautiful.”

Abair performs tomorrow night [July 30] in Honolulu.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 6:37 am and is filed under Smooth Jazz, Smooth Jazz News, Smooth News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.