Friday, June 25, 2021

Untested Songs

Happy Friday to my fans, casual listeners, and people who fell into some kind of internet wormhole and ended up here. Welcome to what I do.  

I was just reflecting upon the fact that I have never played any of the songs from my past two albums in front of a live audience, because I wrote them both during quarantine. Also, a lot of these songs are structured around instruments other than guitar. As a solo artist, that makes playing them live a little more complicated, especially if you consider that I usually ride my bicycle. I'm basically limited to a single instrument that I can strap to my back, which is pretty much always a guitar.

However, Black Ribbon Day, for example, was built around a banjo riff. In fact, it happens to be the first banjo song for which I ever wrote lyrics. It's about the day that the people of the Baltic states symbolically declared their independence from the USSR by holding hands between their capital cities. It is my second most streamed song on Spotify, next to Original Miles--also from Embers (2021).




Petals in the Grass, from Petrichor (2021) is built around the bassline. As you can likely imagine, it sounds quite a bit different when I play it on acoustic guitar. This song is based on the first 16mm film that I ever made. It was a 2 1/2 minute silent, black and white movie about a guy pulling petals off a flower, cross-cut with a woman walking toward him. She loves me, she loves me not, etc. By the time she almost reaches him, he tears off the final petal and the woman disappears. Fin.




In film school, I knew some people who majored in being pretentious. I might have been one of them. 

Enjoy the music, as well as the weekend. If you like what I'm doing, please share it.

Thank you for supporting independent art. 

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