Another Dance

Music is supposedly something that runs in the blood, and so is the sea. My dad is a musician (he was part of the best dance band in Southeastern Idaho in the mid '50s, and he's had his own saxophone quartet for the last 20 years), and he also served in the Navy between Korea and Vietnam. 

I fortunately did not have to join the Navy, but for someone who's never sailed anything larger than a Sunfish, there seem to be an awful lot of seafaring references in my songs, "The Captain's Daughter" being Exhibit A. 

If you listen to even a few bars of this song, you might be surprised to learn that it started out as a guitar riff, and it stayed that way for…years, actually. I'd pull it out and fool with it whenever I had some free time. Never went anywhere, though, until one day I came across a magazine article about The Skeleton Coast, World's Biggest Ship Graveyard (which is off Namibia). Wow! Skeletons, really?  Once you run across a name like that, a song can practically write itself, and in fact these verses then unfolded pretty quickly. 

The chorus, however, was another matter. It just refused to develop, until I decided to take a flyer and try the song on piano. Different instruments pull the song in different directions, and switching to piano simultaneously put a little more drive in the verse and, with the descending bassline, generated a more melodic, Beatlesy feel for the chorus. 

I came up with the melody pretty quickly and then started singing nonsense syllables (a la Keith Richards' "vowel movement" approach) in a generally nautical fashion. I used to date a woman who actually was a captain's daughter (though he flew planes rather than sailing ships), and I guess she was on my mind at the time. The phrase popped up, immediately suggested "water" (duh) as a rhyme, and the song was then probably finished in about an hour. Five years and an hour!

The Captain's Daughter

Spyboy

Molotov Heart

Revolver

This is one of those songs that started as something that wasn't quite there - like a radio station that you can't tune in, and refuses to come in from the static - and then two years later it was suddenly done, and I had no idea how it happened. 

There are lots of interesting words and cool acoustic guitar in this song, but I think the best thing about it is the combination of pedal steel guitar and 4am jungle snare from an abused sampler. It's like Gram Parsons fronting Massive Attack!



Starfish/Sunflower

The true story of a martini and an open mic night with the most beautiful woman in San Francisco....and the devil. If Lyle Lovett had started out on the West Coast, this would've been his first single. 

Sister Rosa

Beautiful Stranger

Curandera

December Girl

1) Grow up in western hemisphere
2) Major in history in college
3) When a friend asks if you want to join him on a road trip from San Francisco to Honduras, say "yes"
4) Smile at rural Mexican constabulary, corrupt federales, 12 year-old Guatemalan paramilitaries in black pajamas with AK-47s
5) Return home with images, melodies and song ideas bubbling out of your ears
6) Crank amplifier, hit record button

(*Note: NEVER play this song in Spain. I almost got thrown off a 5th story balcony in Granada when I tried it.)

Cortez and Pizarro

London Calling

Radio Nowhere is a rock/pop band from Oakland, California, in the United States. A friend told me that we sound like the missing link between Lyle Lovett and Led Zeppelin, and that sums it up pretty well. 

The band was started by Mike Baker, who writes all the songs and does the singing and guitar playing, as well as anything else that needs doing (like, um, writing the band bio). 

I’m supposed to tell you about all the great clubs we’ve played, the records we’ve sold, and the rock stars we’ve partied with, but I think that gets boring really fast – don’t you? Here’s what you should know about Radio Nowhere:

1) When I was growing up, my family would drive from the Bay Area to Idaho every summer, and my mom would make up stories to go along with what we were seeing along the highways. So I got imprinted with the whole combination of music, empty roads and stories early on - hopefully it shows up in our songs.

2) When I was six, I trawled through my dad's record collection looking for the shiniest, most colorful album cover and played the lp inside, which turned out to be Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Psychedelicized at six--it's hard to recover. 

3) I write most of my songs while I'm driving, on an ancient Casio keyboard bungee-corded to the passenger seat. This is not safe. 

4) I have rocked crowds of several hundred people with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a well-timed Britney Spears cover (were they sober? No).

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