Thoughts and News
The Lesson Learned
The first of the older songs and a real flailer of an acoustic guitar piece (as in: the picking style of the guitar line is stolen from “frailing” style banjo picking). When I play this as a solo acoustic song, I play all the guitar solos while playing the rhythm...
Jesus Stole My Cigarettes
This entire collection was probably recorded just to give me a reason to release this song. More than a song, really. It is a tale of uncertainty and loss in the moments and movements of the modern world. A paean to weakness in the face of overwhelming odds. Really,...
Waiting for the World to Change
The year my wife and I married was the year that Barack Obama was elected for his first term as President. I had already voted for him for Senate (and my guitar case had, among other things, an Obama for Senate sticker proudly displayed), so it felt oddly personal. We...
The Many Islands of the James
So, on to the new songs. This is part of a larger, partially abandoned collection of songs built around a central story as a through line. The collection was planned to be mainly electric guitar tunes but, as it went on, several acoustic based songs crept in and,...
No Goodnights and No Goodbyes
This was initially the core of the collection and the first song laid out, instrumentally at least, as a complete piece. All of the songs were going to be based around a very ‘rock band’ sound featuring electric instruments and were all demoed in that format – some to...
Listening to the Rain
The Prelude: When I play this, I always open the piece with a very straight version of the instrumental guitar line before playing it again with more improvised movement and complexity. I wanted to honor that somehow, but to give it a different sound, as well. I...
With the Rain
A new collection of songs. Not instrumentals or soundtracks or improvs or whatever… Songs. It’s been a while. It’s been a long while. That gulf in time has made this a strange little collection, honestly. It is really two groups of songs. The first three songs are...
208
About twenty years ago I recorded an EP that, as I listened back to the recordings for the recent Remasters project, I found to be the cleanest and most “professional” recordings I ever made. This is the collection that would eventually end up being called “We Got Our...
Channel Lights | 2004
This is a song about the end of something. This is a song about the Lake Michigan shore line. It is very much a Chicago song. It’s a song I still pull out and play live on occasion. And I play it for myself quite often. Interestingly, I now play it with some slightly...
Shoot The Moon | 2003
This is the lead song from an EP that was a bit of an end of an era. It is cleaner and more coherently produced than anything that was leading up to it - and it would be the last time I took that approach, really. From here the full band sound would pretty quickly...