Hi, I am the original writer of Molokai Slide. The song came about after my wife and I visited Molokai in 1988 and went to a charming luau put on by the late  Larry Helm.  I wrote the song from all the pictures that I took of the beautiful time we had. It makes me very happy to see so many people still enjoying it. Mahalo, Tad

Episodes and Dreams

Molokai slide

What can I say... I love mangos. I bought a bunch of mangos at Yee's orchard on Kihei Rd and went down to the beach and filled up on ripe deliciousness. I thought I should honor this great fruit that I love so much with a song..

Serve It To Me Hot

I Like The Mango

Sometimes I get so impatient for winter to end. One cold day I was driving (stopped at a light)and I looked up and saw all the jet contrails in the sky and I started to daydreaming about flying somewhere warm and south. I reached out to unroll the car window and my hand was charged with static electricity that zapped me back to reality... stuck in the cold gray north..

She Got Mocha

Cold Gray North

The Ohana in Hawaii is something I have always admired. Living in the middle of such a popular tourist destination has to be challenging, but rain or shine, Ohana is always there and at the end of the day, love is what matters.

Paradise Dream

We love hanging out in the desert southwest. On a warm desert morning outside of Tucson, I began assembling the parts for Saguaro, an instrumental tribute to the magnificent sentinel like cacti that populate the Sonoran desert in a timeless presence. When Tapas Musica became a band, we arranged it for the group and put it on our 1st album, "Serve it to Me Hot."

Saguaro

The older I get, I know in my heart what really is important. Life certainly flies by as in,"we are but a wisp of vapor in the air. My faith has given me an enormous if not incalculable sense of well being and the thought of passing away, although, somewhat curious in a mystical kind of way, does not crush me at all. Add to the fact that I am a really maudlin soul and cry easily when I am not sad but just remembering fond moments of life.  I would not trade my age now for any age, but I relish what tomorrow may bring. (or not). This is another Tapas Musica band rendition, on Album # 2, "She Got Mocha." Sort of like a swan song?

Time Turns to Dust

I wrote and recorded this song for my wife on our 30th anniversary. I took her out to dinner at the Pink Door Cafe in Seattle and they had it playing and she didn't know it was me! She finally figured it out and finally, we had to ask them to quit playing the song. We only knew each other for about 2 weeks and got married. Going on 54 years now!

That's How Love Grows

This is another song we performed in Tapas Musica. I collected butterflies moths and insects as a child, and around 2009, my grand daughter and grand son, asked if we could start another collection. It became a really great event when each summer, we would take about a road trip around 5000 miles into the southwest and all over. Butterflies only live around 2 weeks to maybe 2 months and it is a great way to preserve their beauty and to study them.

Intelligent Design

In an old group that I played in called, "Morningstar,(about 100 years ago,) another member  and I had a contest who could write a song based on the high gas prices caused by poor leadership (J. Carter)
His was kind of serious and no one in the group liked it(just sayin') and I based mine on kind of a Flintstones Cartoon vision that we did in kind of a New Orleans impromptu style with wunderkind drummer Greg Cooper. We had a bunch of fun in the studio with it and recorded it with a live tuba player and also John Standefer, who has won the International Finger Style championship and is one amazing guitar player. You see... gas was at an all time high of $1.83 and everyone was really upset. My good friend Craig Russell was just learning the Clarinet and did a remarkable job on the song. This is definitely an oldie but kind of fun...

Billy Brontosaurus

My little English Grandma lived in Grants Pass, Oregon and we spent many wonderful hot summer days visiting her growing up. She had a little white cottage guest house and a creek that ran through the property that she would flood and water the lawn with. There were flowers all around and nice shade trees but in particular, there was an old apple tree that we sat under on long hot days while Cicadas buzzed endlessly, and just talked about life in general. She finally passed away I think when she was 98 year old and the property was sold. Little by little, I would stop in there to look at it and gradually, everything was torn down and just... gone. Memories are haunting and I realized that the images of what I remembered, were still out there in some timeless form floating across the universe, in bursts of light energy. It is just up to us to capture and hold on to good memories that deserve to Live On.

Live on

We used to have a clawfoot bathtub that I plumbed in on our deck and I would soak  in a luxurious bubble bath under the stars on many warm summer evenings. One night, I slipped into a slight nap and while enveloped in the lubricious heaps of bubbles, I dreamed about being taken away  in what I felt was the Rapture.... Only instead of sailing through the sky robed in what I was born with, I was sitting with my guitar in the clawfoot tub, sailing to eternity, pondering, just how ridiculous I must look.... Anyway, it was a fun dream.

Walkin' In The Stars

Back in the day when I was recording bands and individuals in my studio, way back in 1996, I had a customer that all he could talk about was "surfing the web" and internet this and that... I had no clue what he was even talking about, but he was mentioning about his girlfriend was addicted and how it had changed their relationship. This is back in the day when you had to dial a phone number to get connected via AOL. Anyway, it made me think of kind of a crazy notion about a lovers relation gone bad, and how easy it is to become a prisoner of cyber space.

Left Overs

Internet Prisoner- 9:7:20, 11.36 AM

Nadya is an accomplished violinist, and loves horseback riding. She also is a piano player and professionally tunes and does maintenance on pianos. She lived close to Portland Oregon for years and was often hired as the piano technician for major concerts coming to Portland.  One evening, as we were preparing to load all of our equipment into the van for a gig the next evening, Nadia, loving pianos fervently, started to carry the keyboard out of the basement studio. She is legally blind, and I suggested that maybe something a little easier to carry up the stairs, might be more practical. She persisted and as she reached the top of the stairs, slipped and came crashing down to the bottom of the stairs and lay there in an akimbo form in her bright red dress. As she lay on the basement floor in her red dress with just a little blood oozing from her skull, I just froze in fear for the worst but then she sat up and all I could say is,"are you okay?" She recovered and that evening, I wrote the lyrics to a song that Craig, her husband and I had been working on. It is about the love affair between Nadya, and her keyboard, who is feeling a little insecure.   (Just for reference), but metaphorically about life in general, that at some point, we all tumble down.
The next evening, being the brave soul she is, we performed at our gig and Nadya visibly had a fat lip and a blackened eye. As we started to play, "Tumble on Down, a number of people got up and started to dance and everyone in the group kind of smiled as we thought how the song came about.

Tumble On Down

La Roca

Craig Russell and his wife Nadya, traveled with us now and then and on this particular trip, we stayed near Lincoln, New Mexico in the place where Billy the Kid once resided. We completed working on this song(Little House by the beautiful little river)and enjoyed the magic of this location.

La Casita Junta Al Rio Bonito

A short distance from Lincoln New Mexico, is a little town called Nogal. We stayed there in a B&B and rode horses in the mountains in the day and enjoyed the starry skies that showed up every night. It was a perfect place to come up with this song, The Starry Skies of Nogal. This is a song that we also did in the group Tapas Musica, on the 2nd CD called, "She Got Mocha."

Starry skies of Nogal

Latitude 20

I used to go up to Port Townsend with my little boat that fit on top of my 2 person trailer. I would tie it off on the shore at night. One morning, the tide was fairly severe and the winds had picked up and it had loosened my little crab boat to where it was about 100 yards off the shore floating away. Fortunately, a boat coming out of the harbor was able to grab the lines and brought it in close enough for me to retrieve it. 

Tad Suckling

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