Soulful 💗

"Hey Hey Ramona" was written on the run. After years of touring in America, my career had run into a blind alley. My band was falling apart; relationships were fraying; I was personally and emotionally at a dead end. I fumbled a deal with a big UK label, and after months of negotiation, it fell through at the signing line. It cost me what at that time would have been the biggest score of my career, an advance that would have settled my debts for the record and set me up for a while --not to mention given a proper release to the still my bombastic (and still unsung) analog masterpiece, Unreal Fire. It wasn't meant to be. I guess they could feel what I felt: I was at my wit's end and the vultures were circling already. Bosley was dead to me. This chapter of my career was over.

I wasn't graceful about my exit. I was disenchanted and confused and wanted badly to disappear. I sold my van for cash and was quickly in the wind.
 
I traveled in Europe without a plan and over the course of the next 18 months found myself once again as a guy with a guitar. I lived in in Barcelona for a summer and a fall, which was where the genesis for Ramona came to me. Over the course of the next year or so I added pieces and played with verses. I kept picturing a girl running away from home, stealing out into the indigo predawn and walking briskly, napsack prepacked, through the Creamsickle glow and hum of the city streetlights. I cut all those verses as they were verbose and pretentious and ultimately, not about me. Call it ego, but I suppose you have to write what you know. And I was tired of corralling my listeners and my lines into convenient fictions. It didn't feel real. And so I found myself at long last, slowly and reluctantly turning towards that from which I had fled, trying finally to give my attention, as I believe we all must from time to time, to those enervating and painful realities which lie within. Of course in the end I realized that I was the one running away, and I put down some much less flowery lines but ones that carried the emotional charge of how I felt. I realized for the first time in a long time, that I had written a song about my own life. 

"Hey Hey Ramona" and the other songs which came together over the next few years into my forthcoming album, Waves, were never meant to be a Bosley album. It took my friend and (*clears throat) Grammy Winning Producer Harry Zelnick, who produced the song, to convince me that I should keep the name 'Bosley' drop the tongue and cheek schtick and lean into the vulnerable authentic vibes. The recording which you hear was fixed expertly by Rick Frederick at The Philadelphia Recording Company -- during this time I found out that Rick had worked on and Produced my favorite album by the Roots, How I Got Over and was flattered that he was taking an interest in my songwriting-- and played by me and some Philadelphia music legends Barney Cortez and Chuck Treece (with Harry on drums). The result have mesmerized me for the last year as I've kept Hey Hey Ramona- (named btw for an unrequited crush and now friend) close to my chest. I'm happy to share it with you and hope it finds its way from my dreams into yours.

With Love from Berlin,
Bosley

"But really, as a songwriter, the only thing I do is make jewelry for the inside of people's minds. That's it."                                                                                                                                   ~Tom Waits