Would-be sound tracks if only there were movies accompanying them.  Cannonade is the full tally of original instrumentals from 2006 to 2019.

Cannonade

Tuesday, Sept. 11

It was June, and after the winter that refused to quit, we suddenly found ourselves in pre-summer triple digit heat again. What little escaped the sub-zero freezes and blizzards of April was blighted in drought and heat. Suddenly, like the return of a bad penny, an all-to-familiar plume of grayish-black smoke rose to once again diffuse in the air that chest-stinging smell Coloradans know so well. "O Lord, send rain!", the voices raised to Heaven. The drought had reached stage 4, and the city council bickered over whether to restrict watering California-style lawns that shouldn't even be here to either two or three days a week. Suddenly, on June 28th, the rains came. And July rolled in and the welcome southwestern monsoon with it. And the vegetation flourished, and the lawns brightened, and the local utilities breathed a sigh of relief. And August arrived and the rains still came. And came. And came. Until on August 9th, having dodged the bullet the better part of the summer, the rain became sinister, and the burn scars began to hunker down to the serious business of making good on their threats to punish the people who mistreated their forests. And the rains still came, and boulders and mud with them, and suddenly, people died, multiplied millions of dollars in damage to small businesses were lost to the flood caused by the flames. And the rain came, and came, and the monsoon lingered until early September, when she began her annual ebb south and west, and the dry heat returned to the Colorado front range. And the triple-digit heat of June returned again. And the monsoon looked back, and was not pleased...and decided to vanquish the summer heat once and for all, and with it every man whose home and fortunes lay in the mouth of the canyons. And still the rains came...only this time they mustered all the ferocity of an east coast hurricane. For seven days it rained, some rainfall amounts exceeding 20". Thousands, no tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives were upended, some were lost. The rain had won at last. When I saw the torrent that fell in eastern Colorado on Sunday, this was all I could do. And the rains still came.


And Still The Rains Came

Weekend almost over, a couple more workdays, then zoom!  Jeff boards the big white bird to SeaTac, and his honey's arms.

Happy 'Cause We'll Be Together

Four Scores And Seven Years To Go

Thirty Hours, 1900 miles...and it all began today. 

2-10,11-09...The Final Journey

Too many songs claim, "True Love Will Never Die"...not so. There is a treachery that will murder the truest of loves.  By the power of God, true love may be resurrected from death, but it is not true that true love can never die.  Sometimes, dying is exactly what the Doctor ordered. 

The Night Love Died

Recovery from addictions, whatever they be, require one in Heaven and two on Earth  To truly win the race, one must turn one's will and life over to the care of God.  That being done, God turns the race over to one coach at the starting gate, and one at the finish line.  It is vital to start right and finish well, and for that we must have one ever urging us away from whence we came, and the other reminding us of what awaits at the finish line. Though they be repeated over the course of hundreds and hundreds of miles, there are but 12 steps to this race,  and they must be dispatched in full measure, for the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.  It is the mind made intentional by the will turned over to the care of God that will finish in the end.  Thanks to Matt and Ken for their place in the marathon of recovery, and for my beautiful Pauline, who is the wind beneath my feet.  This is written for you all.

The Sponsor And His Sponsee

"Words are all I have, to take your heart away"...until you find yourself caught in...The Blackout. 

The Blackout

Russell's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day‎

And Still The Rains Came 2015

This year, the church I now attend sponsored a Christmas Eve service they entitled "Blue Christmas".  No, Elvis wasn't in the house.  Nor was Santa.  Nor was Baby Jesus, for that matter.  For many of us, 2016 was a year of suffering, sorrow and loss...some of our own making, some completely out of their hands.  However, as Christians, we have learned that sorrowing and suffering are often tools of God's sanctification process.  What He is after, is not to teach us how to be happy when we are sad, but how to let that sadness in to do its sanctifying work.  Jesus Himself, Scripture says, learned obedience through the things He suffered...how much MORE shall we?

Blue Christmas 2016

A basement jam on a cold December night. 

December Night

Tristitia Senibus, the sadness of the aged, wisdom stockpiled for days all too few, valued by fewer, despised by youth. Furrowed and knit brows, wrinkled foreheads set with too many unanswered questions.  Each day brings another loss, ebb of hope, flight of joy, until all that remains is to return to the dust from whence you came.  

Tristitia Senibus (Sadness of the Aged)

J'ai un rêve qu'un jour chaque vallée soit glorifié, que chaque colline et chaque montagne soit aplanie, que les endroits rudes seront lissés et les endroits tortueux seront faits droits, et la gloire du Seigneur sera révélée, et tous les vivants le voient tous ensemble.

J'ai un rêve (I Have A Dream)

We sat on our buns
When they took our funds
Like marauding Huns
They took our guns

And now our sons
All dress like nuns
And spout off puns
Their fathers spun

America stunned
Because she shunned
The evil ones
Who took our guns.

In piles of tons
They took our guns
New season begun
Are now reruns
 


Mae Liz - Great American Gun Confiscation Resistance - 2013

For every boy's dreams of playing blues guitar
For each young man's wish to be a star
For every lad who can't yet stretch the barre
There is a child who's wandered way too far

Blues On The 16th

The long hot summer of 2012 finally dies leaving embers of fall tragedies yet to come.  

September Ember

Une journée froide et enneigée Mars

It was August 10, 1980.  I was holed up alone in a one room basement hole in the ground in some mansion in the lamp-lit borough of Glen Ridge NJ.  Spread out on the grass in a park by the creek that ran alongside the Garden State Parkway, near Bloomfield Ave. with my semi-hollow body guitar whose brand name long escapes me, wondering how it all had come to this.

Theme From The Exile In Glen Ridge

Whether it's a search, or whether it's a chase, life seems to be careening at a maddening pace down a lubriciously precipitous slope at breakneck frenzy never before experienced in human history.

The Chase (The smoke-out and capture of the Boston Marathon Bombers)

A. Symposium o covers and originals in coneflower variety style

Cannonade

Coneflower Basement Band