Three Songs

Hello listeners, fans and people who landed here by accident. Welcome to what I do. 

Now that I'm done working on the new album (available very soon wherever you get your music), I can get back to sharing individual songs and introducing them as if I was performing for a live audience. Not counting when I was rocking out at the local park a few weeks ago, it's been a while. For more on this, see the picture immediately to the left and/or my Spotify pictures--and yes, I really was playing. I had a nine-volt amp clipped to the back of my belt. I got a lot of cheers and at least a few strange looks from passersby. 

I wrote my most recent two albums during quarantine. It kind of changed my approach to composing, since I wasn't as concerned about performing any of these songs acoustically as a solo artist. This is why so many of these songs are built around instruments other than a guitar, which pretty well dominates my other four albums. 

Back when I was playing live shows on a fairly regular basis, I rarely brought more than one instrument with me--in large part because I rode my bike. I either had an acoustic guitar or an electric strapped to my back, and that was it. 

Whenever possible, I try to keep things simple. 

As for the songs that I would like to share with you today, two of them come from the soon-to-be-released Petrichor. Once it becomes available on other streaming sites, I will post links on this blog. For now, the links that I provided before are the same low-resolution versions that I uploaded to my ReverbNation page most recently. 

The first song is called Dandelion Wine (If Only...). This is one of four songs that came out of a particularly prolific week. I imagined the entire video to this song while I was writing it. I'll tell you about that some other time. This track started with an almost painfully slow and simple bassline, and then I built the rest of the song around that. By the time I was done with it, the bassline had totally grown on me.

This song is basically about making the most of what you've got, even if it isn't much... kind of like the open room of a rented house where I record all of my music on a ten-year-old laptop through some forty dollar headphones. Whatever you have, you make it work.

The second track is called Rat Race. This song also started with a bassline and came from that same exceptionally productive week. This might be my current favorite song of mine. It's fun to play and it's fun to listen to loudly. It's structured like a pop song in terms of the chorus to verse ratio, although I wouldn't exactly call it a pop song, per se. 

It's about dedicating a life to making money for someone else as an interchangeable cog in the corporate machine... or, if you prefer, it is about rodents running around in mazes at the behest of scientists who are indifferent to their squalid existence. Either way. I also had a video in mind when I wrote this song. Sometimes that's just how my brain works.

Third, I thought I'd share my song Be Civilized, which comes from my 2019 album Better Days. I played this one on acoustic guitar yesterday for the first time in a while. It's a cool song, and it's quite fun to play.  

It's about reminding ourselves that civilization exists because this is what human beings figured out a long time ago is what we need to do in order to survive, and the more civil we are toward one another, the better our civilization seems to function for everyone. So be kind. Embrace empathy. Always consider the greater good. Be honest to others and to yourself. Don't be an asshole. You know, basic stuff. Imagine if everybody did these things.

Once Petrichor goes live on Spotify and other streaming services, I will let you know. Despite having listened to these songs literally hundreds of times over the past few weeks, I'm pretty excited to hear it. 

I hope you are, too.