I always wanted a Heritage H-150, ever since I played on in the late 90s. I was recently able to acquire one and this is the first song that I wrote on it. I wanted the riff to sound as big and as heavy as the guitar itself is. I was going for a kind of big, round, Slash playing the neck pickup sound for the lead.

Elephant

This was a fun one for me. I built the song starting with a riff in 13/8, thus the title. 

The intro and outro are in 7/4 and were shamelessly ripped from a Phil Keaggy song from the mid 90s. To complete the Phil Keaggy influence I played the lead using an EBow. 

Of course with the metalesque detuned guitars and techno-inspired sounds the Phil Keaggy influence is pretty well buried.

Unlucky

I wrote and recorded the last part of this one (where the UFO comes out and flies around in the video) first. The Whammy guitar part I was goofing off with made me think of a cute little B movie UFO thing. That set the tone for the rest of the song, which I threw together with some “stock riffs” (I write these things all the time and then find songs to plug them into) and then played leads over those. 

The “verse” leads were played on the neck pickup on my Heritage H-150, and they sound absolutely huge. I love that guitar. The two big solos were played on the bridge pickup of my red Parker. I really enjoyed messing around with an Adrian Belew meets Eddie Van Halen dive bomb technique. The last solo is one of my favorites I’ve ever recorded. The samples came from a 1975 interview with an alleged UFO abduction survivor.

Space Race

I wrote this one at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s a little bleak, and rightly so given when it was written. There was something I got horribly wrong in the lyrics in retrospect. My thought at the time was that the pandemic was going to be a kind of equalizer. 

It looked like it was going to hit the rich and poor alike. Putting that in dialogue with a potential mass extinction event from climate change, and the hope amidst that bleakness was that, despite how horrible things were, we were all in it together. Humanity could come together and solve this problem in a unified way.

I could not have been more wrong. Wealth provides way more insulation from suffering than I had considered. And the world is so polarized right now that nothing, not even our impending collective demise, can bring us together. It’s hard to believe that something so bleak could, in hindsight, also be so naively optimistic.

Stem the Flood

This is a song that has taken a long time to come to fruition. I started writing it when a good friend died in August 2021. I worked out some words but it was just too much to process so I shelved it for a while. Then, some time later, I began to receive visits from departed ancestors in my sleep, my grandfather in particular. 

I began thinking about the nature of those visits and whether what visited me was actually my grandfather in some way that he experienced, or if it was just inside my head and just my own emotions and memories of him. I also thought a lot about my own death, what it would be like, whether my grandfather and other ancestors might be there to greet me, and if that experience, at the very end, would provide some comfort prior to my own extinction.

None of us, obviously, know what happens when we die. At this point I imagine that probably nothing happens. We live. We die. We exist. We cease to exist. I can’t wrap my head around that. I don’t think anyone who is alive can really understand the experience of being dead, or more accurately not being at all. 

I wouldn’t mind being greeted by loved ones who went on before me, and being lovingly welcomed and embraced one last, eternal time though. That wouldn’t be so bad.

As for the music, I have arranged, re-arranged, scrapped, resurrected, and otherwise created and destroyed it several times over in the last couple of years. Finally it has become something I am comfortable sharing. It took a long time, and over 30 guitar tracks, to get here, but I think this one has been worth the wait.

I’m quite proud of it. I hope you like it.

Close My Eyes

I’ve always loved metal, even if I’m not particularly “metal” myself. Two of my favorite bands in the 90s were Circle of Dust and Precious Death. I was introduced to drop D tuning when I was in high school and I messed around with it in my band back then. The drummer in that band had a Pearl kit with a double kick so we did flirt with metal a little, but that wasn’t really my main sound. I went way more in an acoustic direction after that, and then had a career in church music, so metal was shelved for a couple of decades.

This song is my best current attempt at metal. I’ve been messing around with a tuning similar to drop D (DADAAD) and wrote the main riff in that tuning. I wrote the verses in 7/8 to create tension much like you’d find in a movie score (Alan Silvestri does this a lot.) As for the lyrics, they come from a place that might appear morbid, but I promise the experience was and is a beautiful, comforting one. 

As I go to sleep at night my mind will wander, seemingly aimlessly. Sometimes during this process I will find myself traveling through time and space, and I will visit a departed loved one. Usually it is my grandfather. I don’t know if these visits are anything that you would consider “real” or if they are just in my head, but they are incredibly vivid. 

I also have a lot of difficulty sleeping, with my brain inventing things that are wrong and potentially lethal. Often this manifests with it telling me that I can’t breathe, and I begin to panic. I have to sit up, take a deep breath in, and tell myself that I am breathing. Unfortunately this disrupts my visits with departed loved ones, and I feel a deep sense of loss, almost as if that person has died again, and that feeling is what this song is about.

Wake Up the Dead

Growing up, my dad was a much better and more accomplished musician and songwriter than me. Being his son I would look to him for approval for my music, which he would offer, usually accompanied by constructive criticism. That actually really helped prepare me for art school even if I didn't always appreciate it at the time. 

One consistent criticism that he would have of my songs is that they don't have these nice, catchy, repeating hooks. He was always good at writing hooks. He was really good at writing these nice, catchy, repeating choruses. He was really good at writing songs that the crowd would be able to easily sing along with. I've never been any good at that. 

This song is the epitome of his criticism of my songwriting. There's no chorus at all. The hook has no words. It's just a simple repeating guitar melody, but with harmonics that would make it incredibly difficult to sing along with in the unlikely event that anyone would want to. It's also one of my favorite songs that I've written.

Lyrically this is about the search for a god that, if it exists at all, clearly does not want to be found. I wrote this one somewhere between my being in ministry and my current atheism. It borrows heavily from the Book of Job and the Psalms.

There are times when I miss the absolute clarity and certainty of my former faith, but I am oddly in a much better place now that it is gone.

After the Fall

I wrote this song while I was working on material for an industrial metal concept album during the beginning of the pandemic. The material I was writing for that was, unsurprisingly, incredibly dark. This song was a welcome respite from that. 

Joe Satriani is one of my favorite guitarists. You don’t hear that in my playing as much because I am not a particularly technical player. But what I love about Satch is less his technical ability and more his sense of fun. Every time you hear him you get a sense that he has a smile on his face. That’s the feel that I was going for here. There are some nice little noodly bits that took way too much practice time to get right for my liking, too, but if I’m going to try to play this way I need to get it right, or as right as I can, despite my technical limitations. 

The title of the song comes from a section in it that is in 13/8. I started out calling it “Unlucky” (which I ended up using for a different song later) but that title never fit the fun vibe of the song, so I switched it to “Lucky” and then “Lucky Numbers.”

Lucky Numbers

When you cross the bridge over the inland waterway and onto the island of Holden Beach, North Carolina, and turn right, you find yourself on Ocean Boulevard West. I’ve made that right turn countless times in my life, since childhood. One of the more recent times that I made that turn I did so armed with a guitar and a looper, and I wrote this song. 

My family has been going to Holden Beach since long before I was born. In fact, they have been going since before my mother was born. My grandmother’s family owned property on Holden from about the time the island began to be populated until Hurricane Hazel destroyed it in 1954.

Every summer we rent a house on Holden and stay for a week. We could go somewhere else, I’m sure. There are lots of great beaches. But our ties to Holden are deep and every time we go it feels like going home. That’s the mood that I tried to capture both with this song and the accompanying art for it, which features a turtle as a nod to Holden being a turtle sanctuary. 

As for the song, all of the synth parts were originally written on guitar, layered in my looper. When I got home and started recording it for real I decided to use synths instead to make it sound a little more rich and full, which complemented the sampled ocean and seagull sounds well. It is not always the case that everything just falls into place easily when writing and recording, but this one almost felt effortless. Just like going to Holden Beach does.

Ocean Boulevard West

Most of my friends right now are either drag performers I’ve met in gay bars or playground parents I’ve met at my ten year old’s school. It’s kind of a weird mix. My therapist says it would make for a good sitcom but I’m thinking SNL sketch at best. Either way it would make an interesting pitch.

This song started out as an instrumental. I was working on it alongside some other instrumentals that were all in odd meters and played in an alternate tuning (DADAAD). The school is about a half mile away so I walk to pick my ten year old up most days. I do most of my music work during the day when they are at school. I had pretty much finished this song and was mixing it when it came time to pick them up one day. The song was stuck in my head on the walk and my brain wandered around thinking about my own identity and my weird cross section of drag and elementary school parent friends and my almost disbelief at my life so far and how I’ve gotten to this place.

My brain assaulted me with completely unsolicited lyrics while I was walking. When I got to the school, instead of socializing with the other playground parents, I sat on the bench and started typing furiously into my phone, trying to capture as many of the words that flew into my brain as I could before they fluttered off to destinations unknown, never to return. Roughly 20 minutes later my ten year old was done playing on the playground and I was done writing this song.

It doesn’t all make sense, but to quote the Ancient One, “Not everything does. Not everything has to.” I do think it communicates something about the weird and transient nature of the human condition, or some other such nonsense.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I hope you like it.

You Are

I own, quite frankly, a lot of guitars. I also have maybe the world’s tiniest studio, which occupies one corner of a small bedroom that I share with my partner and our five year old. Such is the life of a musician with a lot of kids and a small house. 

I have seven guitars hanging in my studio, and the rest stored elsewhere. I rotate those guitars in and out periodically. I enjoy going “shopping” for my own guitars, getting them out of storage and hanging them up to be able to use them again. At the moment I have an Ovation acoustic, a Fender Jazz bass, a G&L ASAT, a G&L Legacy, a Fender Telecaster, a Heritage H150, and my beloved red Parker, which I have used for almost every guitar solo I have recorded since I purchased it in 2003.

When I write a song I don’t usually just sit down and write from beginning to end with a particular arrangement in mind. Being a parent I don’t always have several hours to work at a time, especially with my studio also being a bedroom that I share. What I do have time to do is to get any of my guitars down from the wall and jam a little, recording whatever riffs I come up with to be used later.

When I get some riffs that I think work well together I start to arrange them on my computer into something that almost resembles a song. After I write this way I will re-record all of the parts and that is what becomes the song.

I ended up using riffs recorded on six of the seven current instruments that I have in my studio (everything except the Ovation), using four different tunings (DADGAD, DADAAD, D standard, and standard).

The bulk of the song was heavily influenced by Black Album era Metallica, but with the very pentatonic blues based solo section in the middle, which actually makes sense in hindsight because that’s really the way that Kirk plays. I just used way less wah than he does. The intro includes my very best Mike McCready on “Yellow Ledbetter” impersonation. I’m a big fan of those double stops. 

There’s a nice happy little accident at the end. I flubbed part of the outro solo on the take I ended up using and in frustration just went stupid with the whammy bar. I ended up preferring that take to the others in no small part due to the whammy stupidity.

Some Assembly Required

The news of Mike Knott's death this week hit surprisingly hard, given the fact that I didn't really know him. I only interacted with him maybe a handful of times, if that, over the years.

As a musician you have a few different types of influences. There are the subconscious ones, the people you listen to who subtly shape your playing and writing just by virtue of listening to them. There are conscious ones, the ones you really connect with and you can see their influence all over your playing and writing, even if you didn't intentionally set out to sound like them. 

And then there are the artists that you completely, intentionally, and shamelessly rip off as much as you can get away with. For my songwriting Mike Knott fell into that last camp. If I could write a song that felt even a fraction like something he wrote I would be truly happy.

This is a song I wrote quite a few years back, either in 2011 or 2012, I don't quite recall. I know I recorded it initially in 2012 but never released it. I was at a crossroads at the time and my life and my music went in a different direction than the one this song was heading. 

Back then I was still very intentionally writing Christian music. I was still a worship leader and, while I pushed my own lyrics as far as I could in that paradigm, I didn't push them as far as I would have liked to. I was very much constrained by my position in the church and in that world. I didn't feel free to say what I needed to say until after I left.

Mike Knott’s music always hit hard because, while he very clearly made Christian music, it was also music that was brutally honest and uncompromising. That is exactly what I was trying to be when I wrote this song. I don't know if I nailed it or not. I don't know if I even came close. But I gave it my very best shot.

Hide Me Away

My relationship with the church is a complicated one. It is a little unreal to me that an institution that saved my life when I was younger also worked very hard to end it. But that is the life of a Queer Christian. Or, at least, a Queer former Christian. 

The first place that I truly felt loved and valued was in my church growing up. We had a large Youth Group and they made me feel safe, secure, and loved in a way that I never felt outside of there. The adult leaders in that group supported me, they uplifted me, they gave me a sense of purpose and belonging that I just did not feel outside of those walls. 

But, while doing that, they also helped teach me to hate myself for who I am. And ultimately a large portion of that denomination hated people like me so much that it caused a schism. Fortunately I was long gone by that point. 

I started leading worship when I was in high school. I went on to spend 20 years leading music in the church, the last 15 of which I did vocationally. As far as music gigs go, while they don't pay particularly well, church gigs are great. If you’re on staff you’ve got really consistent hours and wages. You have a set schedule to work around, having regular availability for other gigs and regular jobs. Unfortunately you also get locked into a kind of life that involves regular surveillance of your personal life, especially if you’re Queer. In hindsight it is not a fair tradeoff. 

I wrote the music for this song on an acoustic guitar. It’s a simple progression. I did a few interesting things with it but there really isn’t much there. Interestingly after recording the song I ended up taking that original acoustic part out completely. It just didn’t end up working with the direction the song took. 

I wrote the lyrics in the shower. Sometimes your best thinking happens in the shower. I often get ideas while having borderline dangerously hot water wash over me. Usually that causes me to jump out of there quickly to start writing, but there are so few words that this one was completely finished before I even turned the water off. 

As for the guitar, this is pretty much the best I can do. I am not always pleased with my playing but I got this one exactly right. I was going for a combination of Jimmy Page on “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and Roy Buchanan. It was played on my heavily modified “Black Pearl” Telecaster, which is not an easy guitar to play but it may be the best sounding instrument I own. Every note is a struggle, but the effort is always worth it.

Chief Of Sinners

This is a recording of my band from high school, Bonn’s Eye. It’s from 1996. I was 17 at the time. The band was me playing guitar and singing, my best friend Will playing bass, my then girlfriend Courtney singing, and our youth pastor Jerry on drums. We wrote our own music, and played at church and school events, as well as one gig at the dock of Williamstown Lake, opening for my dad’s band. This is one of two songs of ours that I found while going through old tapes of my dad’s looking for material for the compilation of his songs that I made back in December. 

We recorded this on a Yamaha analog 4 track that a friend of mine gave me since we didn’t use it anymore. The tape noise on it is pretty bad, but Dolby Noise Reduction sucked the life out of the music, so I just learned to live with the noise. I’m sure I could have figured out how to make it work better but I was a kid so I’m giving myself a pass. There’s also a live cassette of this band out there somewhere, but I have not been able to find it. 

The guitar, bass, and drums were tracked live, each on its own track, using my dad’s band’s mixer. Then the vocals were recorded with both of us singing together live onto a single track. There were no bump downs or anything. I didn’t even know that was possible to do back then. The number of things I didn’t know…

Jerry was an absolute beast on drums. He toured in a band after he graduated from high school before he went into ministry. He had a silver Pearl kit with two rack toms, two floor toms, roto toms and two kick drums. It was the biggest kit I had ever seen in person. 

The rest of us were better musicians than you might expect from some high school kids. Will and I were in orchestra together, and he was all state on upright bass. Courtney and I sang in chorus together, and she was an all state alto. Pretty much the only thing I did back then was write music and play guitar. I was obsessed. That was pretty good foreshadowing for how the rest of my life was going to go.

Goodbye Yesterday

This is a song that I wrote and recorded in 2003. The main character has a habit of allowing fear and insecurity to overwhelm him, and he calls his crush and then hangs up rather than speaking, due to his crippling anxiety. Of course in hindsight that behavior is probably a little creepy, and the song doesn’t really work for today’s generation because of cell phones and caller ID.

I recorded this on a Yamaha AW4416 back in the Pepperhill Studio days with Chappy. We were just learning how to work in the studio, and I was floored at the ability to record 16 tracks. Previously I had only had an analog 4 track, and the best equipment I had ever been exposed to was an 8 track ADAT. Having 16 tracks available to me was world changing. 

I played a Taylor 12 string for the acoustic part and an Epiphone Dot, their version of an ES335, for the electric. I traded a Fender Ultimate Reverb amp that I wasn’t using because of some speaker cone damage for it. It is the only semi-hollow guitar that I have ever owned. It has spent most of its life in a case but it comes out to record a part here and there when it is necessary. It never made my live rotation because it will absolutely not stay in tune. It’s not the best guitar ever but it does its job.

This was also back in my “lead guitarist plays bass like a lead guitarist” era. I’d like to think that I have developed into a better, more proper bass player in the last 21 years since this recording, but if I’m honest I play every instrument like I’m a lead guitar player. That’s just who I am. I guess it’s probably time to just make peace with that. 

On the whole I think this song is well crafted and well played, and stands the test of time pretty well except for the very dated lyrics.

Confidence

I’m really excited about how this one turned out. It was inspired by 90s funk rock/metal (although I ended up not using the more metal guitar parts as they muddied things up a little too much), and also by Adrian Belew. The riff in 7/8 is one that I wrote almost 20 years ago when I was in a band called The Silent Screen, a power trio that had probably the best rhythm section that I have ever played with. 

Working with a really good drummer opens you up to a lot of things. One thing that we were really good at is playing in odd meters, and playing polymeters. What was really fun for me was that I never really had to count anything or figure out what time signature the riffs I wrote were in. I would just play them for Chappy, our drummer, and he would sort all of that stuff out for me. Now I have to do all of that for myself, which I guess makes me a better musician, but it requires a lot more thought. 

The 7/8 riff here never made it into a finished song before the band broke up. I did the same thing here that we did with it in rehearsal: I played in 7/8 with the bass and drums playing 4/4. That kind of stuff is a lot of fun but you’ve got to have a really tight band to pull it off.

I would give most anything to be able to put a band like that together again, but it’s a lot harder to put together a band in your 40s than it is in your 20s. I took so much for granted back then, which is a little bit of what the lyrics to this song are about. You’ve got all of these dreams when you’re young, and ideas of what your life should look like. But life happens and things rarely pan out the way you want them to. 

Of course sometimes they work out better than you had expected. And while my life is dramatically different than what I imagined it would be when I was younger, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Pieces

The lyrics for my songs can generally be explained by one of three things: My religious background, my sexual orientation, and my bipolar disorder. This is a song that can be explained by all three. 

Words used to come easily for me. When I was younger I could just freewrite and come up with more lyrics than I could possibly use for a song within 15 minutes. I had notebooks full of words. Words were always just rattling around in my brain ready to come bursting out at any moment. As it turns out that was likely that was just a byproduct of mania. I don’t mean that in judgment or to be dismissive. That’s just how my bipolar brain worked. I made peace with that a long time ago.

As I have gotten older and further along in my recovery journey, words just don’t come like they used to. But every once in a while the floodgates just open back up. This song is an example of that. 

At the time that I wrote these lyrics I still identified as being a Christian. My relationship with religion has always been complicated both by me being bipolar and being queer. When I was manic I could feel the presence of what I believed to be god, and even would fashion myself as some kind of prophet, even if I wouldn’t use that specific word. I believed that god was speaking to me, and that I could in turn speak for god. What else would you call that?

As I advanced in my recovery with meds and therapy I stopped experiencing that as much. At times I missed it, but mostly it was a relief. Stability may be boring but it is a lot more comfortable. But absent that feeling of direct contact with what I believed to be god, most of what I had left was the religion that taught me that my queerness was a sin and I was going to hell. 

It was important to me for a time to hold on to both my identities as a queer person and as a Christian. When large swaths of Christianity waged a homophobic culture war I felt like it was overlooked that there were so many queer people who are Christians. That started me down the path of writing these lyrics. They are free flowing, stream of consciousness, and don’t always make sense, but that was the inspirational starting point. 

The music came as quickly as the words. My hands found the main riff pretty much on their own. Music, especially on stringed instruments, is made up primarily of shapes and patterns. My hands found these shapes and patterns and went quickly from there. It ended up being a kind of Steely Dan and Foo Fighters mashup, which is not a choice that I would consciously make, but it works really well. 

One thing that surprised me when mixing this song is that the bass part sounds almost exactly what I think my dad would play on this song. Every time I listen I can’t help but imagine that he’s playing it. It’s interesting how our influences find a way of showing up in our music whether we mean them to or not. And, whether I like it or not, my dad has probably been my biggest musical influence.

Surveillance Savior

“In god we trust, but which god and why?”

In Douglas Adams’ novel, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, there is a tragic event that opens the story, and everyone chalks it up to being an “act of god.” This is just the normal response to such things. But the protagonist, Dirk Gently, asks an important question: Assuming that this was, in fact, and act of god, Dirk Gently wants to know which god it was, and why. Incidentally the god in question was Thor, and the why was that he was frustrated, angry, and feeling powerless. We’ve all been there. Just most of us do it less destructively than the god of thunder.

Douglas Adams was my favorite author, and his brand of atheism is something that resonated with me even before I left my faith. So it seems fitting that I borrowed a line from him when writing about leaving the church. The song is about my journey, and how my leaving broke up relationships that I had with people that I loved, and with one person in particular who was both a mentor and a kind of father figure to me. 

This song also serves to kind of question whether something can be gaslighting if it isn't intentional, and whether it's lying if the other person believes that it's true, no matter how untrue it is. I don't know if I'm attacking that person, giving him the benefit of the doubt, or both. But the bottom line is that people can hurt you deeply without meaning to, and it is okay to miss someone and lament that they are no longer in your life because of how they hurt you, even when you know that you are better off for their absence. 

Sometimes I am sorry for the way that I left. Other times I am angry that I had to leave that way. Sometimes I miss that former life tremendously. Other times I am somewhere between relieved and elated that I am no longer there. I contain multitudes.

Ashes To Dust

I am a twin. Some parents of twins will dress them alike, and some twins will lean into the whole twin thing and embrace essentially being one entity, looking and acting very similarly to each other. 

I don’t know if it was growing up as a twin with the last name Baker when a popular movie about twins with the last name Baker came out, leading to everyone calling us the Fabulous Baker Boys, or if it was some kind of innate contrarian streak, but my brother and I decided to be nothing like each other. It didn’t work. Identical twins are identical twins no matter how they dress or try to act like. But we gave it our best shot. 

Part of my brother and I trying to each be our own individual, rather than one part of a whole, involved us having a different color that we identified with. Mine was blue. My brother’s was red. I feel like I won that one. Carolina blue is objectively the best color there is, far superior to any shade of red. Everyone knows this, right?

But then this guitar came into my life. It was a Candy Apple red Telecaster, and it was my first “real” guitar. Then this other guitar came into my life, which has been my go to for recording and live performance for over 20 years now: a red Parker Nitefly. Then G&L came out with a carved top version of their ASAT that I absolutely had to have. It came in two different finishes: transparent black and transparent red. Sweetwater didn’t have the black in stock and I needed it right then and there, so I got the red. 

That guitar has become my go to for writing riffs on, even if I end up using a different guitar to record the part. If you hear a heavy riff on any of my songs it was almost certainly written on that guitar.

Some of the most important guitars in my life and in my music writing and performance happen to be red. Even my beloved Heritage H-150 is even a cherry sunburst, which has an awful lot of red in it. What’s more, I do not own a single blue guitar. 

Which brings me to this song: I recorded this particular song exclusively on red guitars, so when it came time to name it -- and instrumentals are difficult to name for me -- “Press the Red Button” seemed like a perfect name for it.

Maybe red was actually my color after all.

Press The Red Button

I can’t play like Joe Satriani. Not even close. I have never been a particularly technical player. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a shredder. I cut my teeth on classic rock and blues when I was younger, covering bands like Santana, Cream, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. Tapping and sweep picking have never been in my wheelhouse, and I am way too old to change that now. 

Joe Satriani is, however, one of my favorite guitarists to listen to. And, while his technical prowess may be what is most immediately noticeable about him, he is also a uniquely good composer with a gift for melody that is second to none. 

I wrote this song as a tribute to Joe Satriani. I tried to ape the feel of his songs, particularly from early in his career, and then gave it the best leads and solos that I could in my own style, as his is far beyond me. I can’t play like him, but I can play my very best within the framework of a song that he might have written.

I initially recorded this song a few years ago, but I reworked it a little to play it live and decided to go back and re-record it to better reflect where the song is now. It is probably not a coincidence that I decided to do that shortly after seeing the Satch/Vai tour. While I am not anywhere near the same planet as those guys, I’m very pleased with how this one turned out.

Mo Joe

It’s easy to be resentful. I carry resentment around with me everywhere I go. It’s alway been my default. Things don’t always go the way I want them to, life doesn’t always break the way I want it to, I can’t always do the things that you want to, and I start keeping score. It builds up. And then I find myself being miserable, and being a miserable person. 

During one recent session my therapist suggested that I practice gratitude. He suggested that, rather than keeping score of the bad things I start keeping score of the good ones. Sounds pretty simple and intuitive, right? What do I need to pay him for?

As I started practicing gratitude I became increasingly aware of all of the good things that I have in my life, and that inspired me to write this song. Maybe it’s a little sappy. Maybe it’s a little obvious. But it works. 

It’s a pretty simple song. I recorded the progression and the hammer harmonic part on my Black Pearl Telecaster and used the neck pickup on my Cherry Sunburst Heritage H150 for the lead. I absolutely love the tone. That guitar sounds huge. It is easily one of the best guitars I have ever played and I can’t believe that I am fortunate enough to own it and to be able to play it anytime I want. 

I am, ahem, incredibly grateful to be able to make music. I try not to take my ability and opportunities for granted. It is so easy for me to see the things that I don’t have the time and/or energy to do. Being able to write, play, and record a song like this just shows me how good I’ve really got it. 

My life has taken some unexpected turns over the years. I haven’t taken the easiest or most direct path to get to where I am now. But I am exactly where I want to be. I have a great life, and I am grateful for it.

Gratitude

This song was supposed to be vaguely dark and menacing. I was looking to write something in a minor key (D minor in this case) with multiple parts in different meters layering in and out. That was going to create a kind of tense, open, sonic space to play some guitars over. But as I was working on it my five year old son, Adrian, came in and started dancing to it. That changed everything. D minor became D major. Dark and menacing became whimsical. And guitar became 80s synth sounds. 

I don’t think I’m done with this one. I think there are other places to go with it, and I want to explore some guitar ideas. But this feels like a great snapshot of what my process is, and how things can unexpectedly change when a little bit of joy enters the equation. Which applies to life just as much as it does to music.

Adrian's Song

When I was going through old tapes in my parents’ basement to put together a collection of my dad’s music for him for Christmas, I also found some old tapes of mine from when I was a teenager. This song is from one of those tapes. The sound quality isn’t great, especially in one spot in the bridge. I’m sure it didn’t start out sounding as good as I thought it did back then, and nearly 30 years in a box in a humid basement didn’t help any. 

I wrote this song when I was in high school, and was dating a girl whose dad was a drummer who left her and her mom to go off to California to play in a band. My favorite songwriters were all storytellers, and I didn’t really have any stories of my own to tell, so I tried to tell hers.

This recording is from the summer after I graduated from high school in 1997. I recorded it on a Yamaha 4 track that a friend of mine gave me. I played guitar and sang both parts. My little brother, who would have been 15 at the time, played the harmonica part. He was, and is, an incredible musician who can play most anything, but back then his main instrument was harmonica. He played that thing all day every day, and you can really hear the John Popper influence here. 

He and I went on a couple of years later to play in a band together that still is, to this day, probably the best band I’ve ever been in. I found some stuff from that band in the basement as well, and will post some of it sometime soon.

Mend

This is a song that I wrote and recorded nearly 20 years ago, back in the Pepperhill Studio days. With Dave’s Not Here, and with my first solo album, I put a lot of focus on my guitar solos. I don’t want to say that I wrote each song with the idea of a guitar solo in mind, but there was always space for one, and often the guitar solo became both the focal point and the climax of the song. 

This song, along with the others that eventually became the Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow EP, was written specifically not to have a guitar solo. I wanted to shift the focus of the material from what I could play to what mood I could create. To that end I think it was pretty successful. I also think that I must have been listening to a lot of Mad Season at the time, because this feels like I completely aped it from them. 

This is also the first song that I played drums on. I can’t say that I did a good job, but I’m happy that my playing didn’t ruin it. I kept it simple, with just a kick, snare, and ride. I wanted to use brushes, but I didn’t own any, so I grabbed a couple of paint brushes that I had laying around and used them. I must have either been manic at the time or completely broke. Or more likely both.

On the loss of your...

When I was a teenager l I had a Yamaha four track recorder that I recorded a ton of songs on, a few of which I have found recently and posted . Yesterday I got to use that four track for the first time in nearly 30 years, and recorded this song. 

Until very recently I thought that the four track, like so many other things, was lost to time and to memory. I have moved I think at least seven times since the last time I saw it. While I was going through old tapes over Christmas I thought it would be really cool if I had one like it again, so I looked into it but they are hard to find in decent condition for any price worth paying. 

What I had forgotten at the time was that probably 25 years or so ago I loaned it to a friend. As luck would have it, he still had it, and he kept it in far better shape than I would have, so I have borrowed it back from him. 

I have four blank cassettes from I’m not sure when, and they are all 60 minutes. With a 4 track you only use one side, and the tape speed is double what it would be on a regular cassette player, so each cassette will only hold a little less than 15 minutes of music. I got set up, set some levels really quick, and jammed around on the first song of mine I could think of. It’s a three minute song so I could do four takes. This is take three. 

I recorded the first guitar and vocal part at the same time, overdubbed the second guitar, and then overdubbed the second vocal. I only gave myself one take for each part. It was either there or it wasn’t. I didn’t want to get into the weeds here. I can do that with my computer. I was trying to capture something that felt immediate, raw, and alive. 

As for the 4 track, it worked pretty much exactly how I remembered. The record button needs to be pressed a little harder than I feel comfortable with given its age, but otherwise it did well. The tape noise is as bad as I remember, but the noise reduction sucks the life out of it. I also couldn’t figure out how to mix in stereo, no matter where I panned each track they all just stayed right in the middle. But that’s how I did it back in the 90s so it seems appropriate here. Best not to overthink it. 

I will probably do a few more songs like this. It was a lot of fun. But I may need to practice a little first. I haven’t played without a net like this in awhile.

Good News

I recently reacquired my old analog four track from a friend whom I let borrow it probably about 25 years ago, during which time he kept it in far better condition than I would have. I’m working on recording some stuff on it like I did 30 years or so ago. I have four cassettes, each of which will hold about 15 minutes of music. So I’m giving myself three or four takes, depending on song length, for four songs, one per cassette, to record my current music the way that I would have recorded it 30 years ago. 

This is a song that I wrote on piano but changed the arrangement to be able to play it on guitar live. I wrote it about my experience with spiritual abuse and gaslighting leading up to my leaving ministry, and then the church altogether. I wrote this song while processing the years of abuse and gaslighting, which I did not recognize as such for a very long time. I was questioning how my pastor and mentor, who was a father to me, could do what he did. Did he know what he was doing? Was he only doing to me what was done to him? Did he really believe what he said he did? Did he ever want to escape the same way that I did?

I will never have the answers to those questions, and I will never have the decade and a half that I lost to that life. But I’ve got this song.

I recently reacquired my old analog four track from a friend whom I let borrow it probably about 25 years ago, during which time he kept it in far better condition than I would have. I’m working on recording some stuff on it like I did 30 years or so ago. I have four cassettes, each of which will hold about 15 minutes of music. So I’m giving myself three or four takes, depending on song length, for four songs, one per cassette, to record my current music the way that I would have recorded it 30 years ago. This song is the third of those four songs. 

While I am no longer a particularly religious person, every once in a while something kinda pulls at my spiritual heartstrings, and I start feeling a weird, amorphous sense of interconnectedness with the vastness of the Universe and everything in it. 

There is a sense of peace in that, but also a lament. It’s like the Pauline “now we see in a mirror dimly” but without the Christian baggage. I want to see more clearly but my efforts are always futile. There’s a glimpse, a sense of hope, a “Wait a minute, what was that?”, and then it’s just gone. That’s what I wrote this song about.

All That's Ever Been

I recently reacquired my old analog four track from a friend whom I let borrow it probably about 25 years ago, during which time he kept it in far better condition than I would have. I’ve been working on recording some stuff on it like I did 30 years or so ago. I had four cassettes, each of which can hold about 15 minutes of music. So I gave myself three or four takes, depending on song length, for four songs, one per cassette, to record my more current music the way that I would have recorded it 30 years ago. This is the fourth and final song. 

I wrote this song during a strange period in my life. I was in art school and a fellow student experienced psychosis in what became a very frightening manner, which ultimately led to him making several death threats, including one to me. My art, like my music, was (and is) very religious in nature. My fellow student was also very religious, and in his psychosis he believed himself initially to be a prophet, and then to be the second coming of Jesus. 

This student grew fixated on me because of the religious nature of my art, as well as my name, which he was especially fixated on. Thomas was okay. As Thomas, obviously I doubted, but Jesus didn’t have any beef with Thomas. Where things got a little more terrifying was when he decided that maybe, instead of Thomas, my name was secretly Judas. If that was the case then it really was over for me. After that I was advised to avoid my studio and campus for a few days while campus police investigated him and his behavior towards me, as well as several other people. Fortunately no one was hurt during all of this. 

The experience afforded me the opportunity to think about my name, and names in general, and how powerful their meanings can be. So I wrote this song. I had never really identified with that particular Thomas before, but even when I had faith it was the kind of faith that, if it didn’t necessarily demand proof, it certainly wouldn’t mind it. I used to say that god always showed me just enough to keep believing for another day.

I am quite happy with how this one turned out. The first take ended up being the best one. If I weren’t recording in this format I might try another take on the lead vocal, but the guitars were good enough that this is my favorite, and I gave myself very specific rules for how to work. Overdubbing a new vocal would violate those rules. Maybe I will do this arrangement again with my actual recording setup. Or maybe I will just let this stand as is. Time will tell.

Thomas

This is a song that I wrote in or around 2005. I included it on my Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow EP, which I have been remastering and have discovered that it has aged far better than I expected it to. This is another song that I played drums on. I am not a good drummer. I am not a drummer at all. I am barely passable if I keep it as simple as possible, which I think actually worked for this very sparse arrangement. 

The song is about vulnerability. It is one of several that I wrote around that time. Anxiety and insecurity have driven the bus for me for a very long time. Still, I love this arrangement and especially the electric guitar part, which is very much in service of the song and takes a back seat to the main acoustic part. I was in my mid 20s at the time and was only just discovering that I didn’t have to add a guitar solo to everything. That is a lesson that I learn and then forget quite often.

Naked

Another one from the Way Back Machine. This song is the fourth song from my Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow EP from back in the Pepperhill Studio days. It is, I believe, the first song that I used my EBow on. I don’t recall what guitar I used, as I always use the EBow with my white Parker, but I didn’t buy that song until a couple of years after this was recorded. So in my head it was the white Parker but that would actually have been impossible. Memory is so weird.

My younger brother played harmonica on this track, which may have been the last thing he recorded with me. It’s been nearly 20 years. We probably ought to fix that. I played percussion. I didn’t have a shaker, but for some reason I really wanted a shaker on it so I grabbed a container of sprinkles from the kitchen and used that. You make do with what you’ve got.

Stay

I’ve been working on stereo mixes of the four songs that I recorded on my old analog four track, using my computer. I’m adding a little bit of reverb, eq, and compression here and there. To do this I have to play each track individually from the four track, through my audio interface, and into the computer. 

A (not so) fun discovery was made: The four track doesn’t play at exactly the same speed every time. It’s a very small difference, but by the end of each song you can hear that things don’t line up quite right. I played and sang at the same time on these songs, so there is a lot of bleed between the guitar and vocal tracks. Even being almost imperceptibly off is a big problem when the guitar from the guitar track doesn’t line up with the same guitar on the vocal track. 

I man with less time on his hands would have given up. But I cut and pasted and messed around until everything lined up just right. And this is the result. 

As for the song, it has always been a better live song than a studio song. I’ve tried recording it a few times in a few different ways and I have never been super happy with the results. But this… I am quite pleased with this. So tape noise and synching issues and everything else aside, I feel like this is the “definitive” version of the song. 

You know, until I record it again…

All That's Ever Been (stereo)

What happens when you teach a kid Suzuki violin, have him grow up in the home of a rock band, and then give him a guitar and get out of his way?

Throw in a love for Dave Brubeck and odd time signatures, some Phil Keaggy and open guitar tunings, a little Klayton and Trent Reznor, a touch of Adrian Belew, a dash of Danny Elfman and Alan Silvestri, and then stir in a heaping helping of big dumb guitar rock, and you’ve got a mishmash of influences that make up my sound. 

I like to make interesting music, and I get bored easily. I am equal parts composer and performer. I sing a little. I play a lot. And I really dig making absurd beats in weird time signatures that don’t make any sense until they do.

Friar Didymus

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