For eight songs recorded straight to analog and mixed in a few hours, I think we did pretty well. In those days, you might be able to punch in a part, but there was certainly no "fixing" anything with digital magic.
So I have a new release featuring two heartfelt love ballads. The first track, "Never Again," is a song I wrote in the 90s, at the time I was shooting for a soulful R&B song with its raw emotion and smooth vocals. I'll be the first to admit that smooth vocals aren't my specialty.
The new EP is out on all the streaming platforms. Details on the songs are below the links.
I started writing the song For Everyone about ten years ago. Like most of the songs I write, it started with a chord progression followed by a vague idea of what the melody could be. One day I was driving and listening back to an acoustic strumming the chords, and the beginning of the chorus just came to me out of the blue: When do we get to the part where we stop hurting each other? How do we get to the place where we stop breaking each other down? It had been some time since I wrote a song with a "message" and this one seemed to be writing itself. Suddenly, I felt this one needed to be done in a hurry and rushed out. I already had a couple of new songs close to the finish line, Yup and Paying for Lessons. Now I felt like I was close to getting an EP worth of material , and I wanted to get it to the masses. It didn't take more than a couple of days to get the lyrics finished, now I had a song I could play on an acoustic, but I wasn't sure where it would go from here. I brought it to the studio where my stepsons worked on music and asked if they wouldn't mind learning it real quick and putting down bass and drums, I was still just strumming an acoustic. I think we wen't through the song all of three times and I brought home the acoustic, bass and drum tracks. In the big picture, I wanted this to have electric guitar instead, so I recorded a kind of funky electric riff over the drums and bass, put power chords over the chorus, and then another track of lead throughout the song. The final touch I figured it needed was female backups on the chorus. At the time I was in a cover band and I got the female vocalist from Tastes Like Chicken to sing a three part arrangement I put together, and I figured it was ready for prime time. Since this was the song with the message I made it the title track of my EP, and I rushed it out to CD Baby and all the streaming services. You can check out that version here:
So after ten shows in ten weeks I said enough, I'll get to it when I get to it. I don't know that I put that much more than a week into prepping for this one, I just quit worrying about playing for a while. And then, I gotta put on a show. A weekend alone with the new puppie is perfect. What am I gonna play? I like to open with songs I have no business singing so here's Sarah McLachlan.
At some point I had the idea to put Zeppelin's That's the Way together with Pearl Jam's Daughter. I think it was the first time I heard Pearl Jam's Daughter. Turns out the same custom tuning works for both, win win. The tuning break is a little long, but a 10,000 Maniacs song and then another brilliant twofer, Too Late and Too Late.
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.
The first Mother's Day of the panedemic calls for another Floyd start, amiright? Little Richard died so I had to lay into some of that. And 16 years after we played it at the Double Door on Mother's Day I played Mama Baby, I'll probably always play that on a Mother's Day gig.
Opened with Nobody's Home from Pink Floyd and then into a request. I'll do what I wanna do but maybe what you want to? What you want? The trying to have a full new set list every week has me relying on lyrics and chords on the screen and I can see it. I pick songs that have just always been with me and see if I can. I should leave Zeppelin alone but I'm not gonna.
April 26th, 2020 My first attempt to use the looper (Summer Breeze) is a terribly painful four starts, but it gets going eventually, and I need to practice this now. My snide comment about people requesting songs "I already played in other sets" goes to show how seriously I'm taking myself at this point, but really I'm just trying to play a whole new set every week to see if I can do it.