One day my friend Dan and I were walking around Oak Park, and I happened to have my acoustic with me. We had been up all night as was often the case on Sundays in the nineties, and we were still a little altered. We noticed just on the other side of Harlem Ave in Forest Park there was a ton of activity.

Three Four was one of many songs that started with drummer Ben Gold saying, "I have an idea for a song!" In this case he followed that up with his best impression of a heavy guitar riff and went, "Du-dun, Du-dun, Du-dun, Du-dun Dun, Du-du-du-dun, Du-dun, Du-Dun, Du-dun, Du-dun Dun, Du-du-du-dun, Du-dun, Du-dun, Du-dun Dun, Du-du-du-dun, Du-dun, Du-dun, Du-dun Dun…."

In 2011 I decided to start documenting all the songs I've written over the years. There are dozens of them, many I've written along with some really great artists. As I started documenting the lyrics I looked to see how many I had good recordings of. I decided there had to be enough good songs here that never got a proper release, and would be worth 99 cents each.

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?

This is also one of the first songs written for what would become The Kenilworth Project. For more on the beginning of The Kenilworth Project see Mama Baby. This was one of the first four songs that we recorded, and here again it was just Ben and I in the studio initially, and again Patrick went in later and put a much better bass line down.

I have a friend named Barry who is the king of writing acoustic guitar intros. We used to live across the street from each other, he’d bring his acoustic over, and it seemed like almost daily he had another intro written.

Sometime around early ’07 I was working on a new song that started off as something like electronic music. I had started with the drum programming, and I worked the chord progression out while playing the wurlitzer through a wah-wah pedal, and I had something different than most of my other stuff.

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.

I wrote this song sometime after The Kenilworth Project was over, and it was the first time I sat down to write with an acoustic in a decade. As such the song quickly became personal and introspective. There are a few songs I’ve written where the words just seem to come out with no effort and this is one of those.