This one went down pretty easily. I wrote in alternate tuning (Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" tuning: CGCFCE), and I believe I used the Guild D4. Single guitar pass and vocal, one take for each, with a fix or two. Rich is such a great engineer that these tasks are never a problem. Having engineered myself many times, it can become a mighty struggle. Rich put down a hypnotic little percussion loop, then bass. Although it's fun to play bass on my own tracks, I love giving it over to Rich, he really is… Continue

This song had it's start under bogus circumstances. Learned through the Grapevine that LeeAnn Rimes was looking for material. At that time I was still toying with the idea of expanding my craft to write for other artists. I thought a mainstream Nashville player like LeAnn could use some street cred, a closer-to-the-bone personal thing, like George Jones tried to do with "Choices". Never underestimate the power of my delusional mind to get it wrong. Here's the 3 ways I blew it.



1.… Continue

Guilty pleasure: I am a fan of the BIG DUMB ROCK. True, I love smart writers and smart music, Aimee Mann is it in my book, Leonard Cohen, Red House Painters, John Prine, Me'Shell Ndegeocello, Nick Drake get lots of play in my iTunes list, I have a huge collection of Western classical music and jazz, and I even bought and devoured the new They Might Be Giants album for science geeks. (If you laugh because these examples are not sufficiently smart/obscure/hip/geeky enough for you, please email… Continue

This was the first track we recorded. We worked at Rich's apt in Hollywood. It was a while ago so details are a bit sketchy.



I had been overworking the song, playing it in a folky, Roger McGuinn-like, Byrdsy drawl. Every time I would try a home recording version I would run it by Amy Raasch, who loved the song. Very politely she would deem each version underwhelming. Back to the drawing board.



Rich Jacques suggested we take a different direction. He set up my guitar to… Continue