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Started with a terribly painful Tracy Chapman. I really do mean well. I'm learning a new show every week, what're you doing? Did you know it's Take a load off Fanny, not Take a load off Annie? The things you learn with an exercise like this one.

It isn’t always easy to give it up It isn’t always easy to throw it away I know you want to throw your hands up But what about yesterday I can’t promise you anything but what I see from where I stand I tell you everything I know and that I’m reaching for you Now do you want to understand The mind tries to be innocent- nobody wants to take the blame But when you see that it’s just you in the way it’s the beginning of the pain Most of the time- I’ll bring you back belief What comes around if you can look into my eyes It’s coming back to you so you can open up your mind and Let go and surrender if you can let go Deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel How long before nothings real again Let go and surrender Let go deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel How long before nothings real There must be something you like In the place that you hide There must be something you don’t want to give away What makes you want to stay You can’t go anywhere to get to here You’ve got to be here right now The only way to stay is grab a hold of the day But your hands are full of memories You haven’t even been here before So why are you telling me that you can’t take it anymore I know it’s hard to believe that I’m not lying to you But I got nothing less to lose at least we got today so you can Let go and surrender if you can let go Deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel How long before nothings real again Let go and break down your defenses Let go deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel How long before nothings real again If there’s one song that’s going to make people say, “Damn Dr why did you put this one on the album”, this is the second one. This song was written for a woman, and was about the personal issues and experiences she had that were impeding our relationship. However they can just as easily be about anyone that uses their past as an excuse no to succeed. Listening to a playback of this song as I was working on the remix for An Anthology of Sorts I found it to be an appropriate message to myself. Which I suppose is a testament to the fact that I shouldn’t even be telling these stories, I should let folks get their own message. But I digress…. I wrote the music for this song while I was visiting my home town. The person I was visiting was at work, and I was actually using my car stereo as an amp for my electric guitar. Years earlier I had bought this little practice gadget that you could plug a guitar into, it had a tape player/recorder, and even came with a headset microphone. The headset microphone was long gone, but I could play my guitar through it, and I had the headphone jack running into a cassette adapter in my car stereo, and I was sitting in the hatchback area with guitar coming out the speakers on either side of me. It was here that I came up with the two different guitar parts for the verses. I initially recorded this for Dr Wippit’s 1st Time Out with the old 8 track to cassette machine. I know I wanted the power chord guitar that opens the song to sound like Motley Crue’s first album even though that album was already 15 years old. I’ll always have the Crue’s first album on my top ten/desert island discs list. If there were ever an album that sounds like pure cocaine, that’s it. As a matter of fact that opening riff is almost completely stolen from Come On And Dance. The rest of the song seemed to add up mathematically and it seems like I programmed and played everything right, but the version that’s on the first Dr Wippit album just sounds terrible. Fast forward fifteen more years, and I wanted to see if I could get this song to sound right. I dumped all the original instrumental tracks into my pc and figured I’d be able to clean them up and create separation I couldn’t get with the old school technology. An initial issue as that the old four track can only put out four tracks simultaneously, and I’d already learned that if you tried more than one pass, the timing wouldn’t be quite right. So if I wanted two guitars, bass, and drums, I had to give up on stereo drums. I did try to recreate stereo by copying the mono track and putting different eq on each one and then panning. Another one of the first things I tried was taking the harmonies I used in the last verse of the original version and putting them throughout the song. I decided they didn’t work everywhere, but it added to quite a few places. I put a significant amount of time into getting the guitars to sound better through eq and a lot of volume changes to make sure I could here what I wanted to hear for each part. In the end I’m pretty pleased with the final mix, it sounds like 90s glam rock meets Seattle with a touch of prog metal, what more could you ask for?

I know I never liked the feeling when I’m lying there alone at night lying awake and wondering am I right am I wrong All along a conversation going on in my head I never got a straight answer from me But when I think about it now it seems amazing cause a couple of lovely ladies My mama and my baby got me standing tall It’s not a problem at all Whatever I see there – they both always be there for me I don’t know where I’d be without these ladies in my life They keep me grounded I feel dumbfounded when I think about the love and the blessings they surround me with I don’t know where I’d be without these women in my life (don’t need to say it again) but I’m gonna my baby and my mama always standing in my corner for me If I could take a trip in time I wouldn’t make it cause I finally got to the place and now I love the situation I’m in I never thought that I’d have been so lucky and happy Know I’m soundin’ kinda sappy Some people get to laughing and that’s all right So well I’m sleeping at night And it’s all day feels like that I wanna say That I’m in love with a lady who’s in love with me I got my mama on the phone whenever I need her to be there for me I don’t know where I’d be without these ladies in my life They keep me grounded I feel dumbfounded when I think about the love and the blessings they surround me with I don’t know where I’d be without these women in my life (don’t need to say it again) but I’m gonna my baby and my mama always standing in my corner for me This is one of the first songs written for what would become The Kenilworth Project. The Kenilworth Project started with just Ben Gold on drums and me on guitar, we had a goal of starting a group that would be a little of everything, from ridiculously fast and heavy to slow and melodic. We were in a hurry to get things going, so we actually went into Gremlen Studios with four brand new songs within about 6 weeks of starting this new group, and Mama Baby was one of them. Ben played drums and I did everything else. The back up vocals and harmony came to me in the studio. Once I was able to hear the song with a bass as well as guitar I started to hear more layers that just needed to be there. At the same time Ben had booked our first show, and we needed to come up with a bass player quick, I was able to talk Patrick Cassin into giving it a shot even though his experience was with guitar. At the time Ben booked the show we didn’t have a name. When the manager of Uncle Snorky’s asked Ben for a name the first thing he thought of was the cold he was suffering from, and we were listed on the marquee as “All Hopped Up On Sudafed”. I sure wish we had taken a picture of that. It was Ben that had the idea to write a song for our moms, and I expanded the concept to include our wives, because I really don’t know where I’d be without Ms. Wippit. I had folk/hip hop in mind and the more we worked on the song the more it seemed like a true hit. Shortly after playing that show we brought Patrick into the studio and he put his own bass lines down on these four songs, and he did a stellar job. I hadn’t been happy with the original guitar solo, and rather than waste more studio time I recorded a few at home and brought in the one I wanted to use. I swear we ended up with the wrong one, but I’ve heard it so many times it sounds like the right one. While I was working on the solo at home it occurred to me that an acoustic guitar strumming a rhythm would really give it the folk/hip hop sound I was looking for, and I recorded that at home too. I don’t remember how long it was before we decided a “guest rapper” would really make this one a hit, but I know it was long enough that some people didn’t like it that way. Well we thought it was good. I added an extra four bars after the solo to give our friend Bobby the Dread a full eight bars to work with (copy and paste) and he worked on it in his own basement studio. If I dig around in enough old hard drives I can probably find an old version without Bobby, but me I prefer this version. And below you can see The Kenilworth Project (calling ourselves Cortechs at this point) playing the song on Mother’s day ’94 at the Double Door in Chicago with Jake freestyling the flow in the middle.