Hello Friends!  It's been a busy season for everyone, and I wish good luck to all of you in this new year.  One of my resolutions is to update this blog page with a little more regularity.  I admit that's not saying much since I've set a fairly low bar for update frequency, but I'll press on.

One of my good friends is from Somalia, and he's been very generous about sharing his musical heritage with me.  The above video of Omar Dhuule, a phenomenal musician and oud (the wooden stringed instrument you see above) player from Somalia, is one of the most incredible performances I've seen recently.  The oud is like a guitar in many ways, except it lacks frets, has a much larger body, and uses a smaller tapered neck.  It's tuned in a variety of ways, mostly using Middle Eastern and North African tuning systems.  It's certainly not easy to play, and Omar Dhuule is a master.

For me, watching Omar Dhuule play really transcends any language barriers between Arabic and English.  Everything is clear in this music.  Hope you enjoy.

This song is a throwback treasure.  With all the trappings of the most excellent Eric Serra synthesizer textures (look him up) and downtempo Portishead rhythms, what's not to like? 

Enjoy this one, it's a gem.

Keith Kenniff is just so good.  Enjoy.

I was recently reading an essay by Adyashanti called Authentic Inquiry.  It inspired me quite a lot, and the first two paragraphs are below (click here to read the essay in its entirety):

What is inquiry, really? This is a good question. And like most really good questions, it is very basic. Authentic inquiry is allowing yourself to care, to take on the weightless burden of caring. Everyone knows what it’s like to inquire out of intellectual interest—asking for the sake of asking or because you think you should. This is not caring. When you care about something, it gets inside of you. It gets inside the shell that keeps you from being affected or bothered, the shell that keeps anything really new from happening.

So in the beginning, to deeply inquire about anything, you have to care about it. You have to care enough to allow it to get inside that shell. What do you really care about? What pulls you into here and now, this minute? What is the most important thing to you? For real inquiry, it is important to be asking about something you sincerely care about. The question needs to be personal, not about a spiritual teaching or something that’s outside of your experience. It needs to be something that’s coming from the inside.

In light of the astounding political dysfunction and rancor in this country recently, I'd like to encourage each of us to take some time to consider what our most pressing personal inquiry (or inquiries) might be at the moment.  Perhaps it's time for each of us to devote more attention - with great care - to our individual inquiries.  In my "other" professional occupation, I've been dramatically impacted by the political goings-on of recent weeks, so I now have a much greater amount of time to devote to composing and recording music (music is my umbrella inquiry).  For this time, I am grateful.  Just because I live in a town that fosters such a gross amount of superficial and inauthentic hullabaloo doesn't mean my creative output need be plagued by such soul-crushing madness.  Let's get real, already.

This photo, by the way, is quite real and was taken at Old Rag mountain in Virginia on a recent hike.  Although slightly touched-up, this photo captures a totally authentic moment of serenity I shared with the mountain, and now with you.  It goes quite nicely with Song for Burton on my music page.

1)  I am planning to begin recording an instrumental album for release in the fall/winter of this year.  I’ll be posting my progress along the way, most likely in the form of audio.  While I enjoy songwriting – with lyrics – I really think it's time to focus myself on my strongest interest and talent, which is instrumental writing.  I’m looking forward to this project, and I'm hoping to include some of my very talented friends in the effort.

2)  I have to thank Marty Clark for turning me on to a band called Bad Books.  A group that’s come together to give American folk/indie/alt-rock a solid kick in the pants, I’m thoroughly impressed with their music.  To be clear, I’m actually much more impressed by their lyrical writing than their instrumental writing.  One of my favorite Bad Books songs is from their self-titled album, and it’s called Mesa, AZ. 

Existential dilemmas like heartbreak, loneliness, and doubting one’s purpose in life are all dead horses that have been repeatedly beaten in nearly every musical genre imaginable.  My personal musical favorites on these issues are Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or John Prine.  But while these themes are indeed widely covered, few musicians effectively capture the subtle humor and freeness that’s inherent in the seeming absurdity of heartbreak, loneliness, and purposelessness.  I’m not sure if it was intentional, but Kevin Devine (the Bad Books singer) really seems to channel Sartrean Existentialism in this song.  (A central theme in Sartrean Existentialism goes like this: “man exists without purpose, finds himself in the world and defines the meaning of his [own] existence."  While I’m no authority on the strengths or weaknesses of Sartre’s philosophy, I do think he wrote some very beautiful and thought-provoking stuff.)

From the opening verse, Devine establishes the absurdity of our hardships:  

        We passed 800 miles talking circles about living with loss
        You said your sense of humor’s always helped you get above & across
        Every hurdle, every chasm, every shocking & unspeakable blow
        Just proves the universe is chaos so you laugh to clear the lump from your throat

If the universe is chaos, then the extreme and cruel hardships (either physical or emotional) we face are meaningless.  Again, this seems very Sartrean.

Further along:

        You were hanging out the window, you said: “We’re just a beggar’s banquet in space”
        You were laughing at the moon, you were cursing it for wearing your face

If we’re purposeless, then we aren’t anything more than beggars in space, fumbling around with having to make purpose for ourselves.  The moon is cursed here, because we, like the moon, have no identity unless we define it for ourselves (on Sartre’s view) – and for the character in the song, an identity is still undefined, much like the moon.

Anyway – enough over-analyzing – I really enjoy this song, and I like the imagery it provokes in my mind.  Hope you like it too...

1) I'm still here - just very busy at the moment.  More music is en route.

2) Because I've been listening to a lot of Phantogram recently, I posted a video above.  This band is very great.

Enjoy.

The last of four songs recently recorded with my musical compatriot, Eric Delia: The Complaint Department.  Sorry about the delay - I've been quite "under the weather" this week!  The link above, to the Foreign Fields website, is where you'll find the beginnings of the new musical collaboration between Eric and I.  Stay tuned - we're already laying down some very cool new tunes.

While Eric and I certainly lots of work to do, I'm definitely feeling inspired by our musical collaborations.  Hope you enjoy. 

PS - A new studio space is on the way - which means even more recording.

This is the second of four installments featuring recently recorded songs by Eric Delia and I.  These songs are still definitely in their rough states, but half the fun of recording - in my opinion - is in sharing, mixing, and editing the songs over a period of time.  Mixing is by all accounts a complex art, and a really fun challenge.  So before the product is finished, I think it can be incredibly beneficial to incorporate and embrace feedback on the music and mix. 

I find that living with a piece for a few weeks can provide great insight on changes I'd like to make, etc.  Of course, in this situation, there is no rush, so this method works very well.

This song is called The Northwest Territories.  It's about a road trip I took many years ago in which a wrong turn took me much further north than intended...

Walk On By, originally written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, is an incredible song that still finds new life nearly 50 years after it was written.  Even though the song has been covered more times than some would care to remember - some great (D-Train!) and some not so great (Jo Jo Zep) - I would nonetheless like to add yet another version to the catalog (listen above), as arranged by Eric Delia and I.  What's interesting about this song isn't that it's been performed by so many different artists, but that it's been recorded by so many different artists in so many different musical genres (or musical fads, if you like).

Eric Delia - brother from another mother, long-time musical collaborator, and lord of all things beer over at the infamous Relentless Thirst blog - has for many years played a seriously original and impressive acoustic guitar arrangement of this song.  Throughout our college days, I remember hearing this song and thinking that it would exceed any reasonable expectations for "a cover song."  In fact I thought Eric's acoustic arrangement of this song was so darn original (and good!) that if there were any remaining similarities between his version and the original, it would be merely coincidental (lyrics aside, of course).  I've always wanted to record and collaborate on this song with Eric, and we finally had the opportunity in early December.

Eric drove up from Richmond for a weekend and we agreed to devote ourselves to working on four different songs in my studio (I'll be posting all four songs in the coming weeks).  Because recording can be an all-consuming process, I knew that we'd need to record all of his vocal and instrumental parts first, since I'd be able to add my instrumentation later on.  After we finished recording all of his parts for the songs, I came back and added vocals, cello, and/or guitar as needed.  We're very fortunate to live in such a technologically savvy age indeed: we reviewed and critiqued multiple versions of each song's mix via e-mail, which made our geographical distance a non-issue.  Fortunately, Walk On By sounded pretty darn decent on the first mix.

For me the original Walk On By is amazing for many reasons, but I've always felt the lyrics were much darker and melancholy than the original instrumentation indicated.  It's just because these lyrics speak of such a burdensome and self-resigned emotional defeat that I think a slowed-down arrangement really does well to get at the core of this pensive mood.  So while you'll find that our version is quite different from the original, it's because we were trying to create a different musical framework from which to support the heavy sorrow that we see in the lyrics.

As always, thanks for listening and reading - hope you enjoy.