As the son of a jazz drummer, I started singing professionally at 15. I was heavily influenced by my dad’s record collection, filled with legendary recordings of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Elvin Jones, and Ella Fitzgerald. I was also fed a healthy diet of folk and country (mostly the outlaw guys) and I learned to love the stories I learned listening to Townes van Zante, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard. After a lifetime of playing in funk and jazz bands, I was eager to delve into my folkier, Country side. These story-driven, acoustic guitar pieces, written late at night in my studio, pouring frustration and observations onto the page and into the microphone, felt like a coming home. They were dark and brooding, and they absorbed my energy like a sonic sponge.
I dug in, recording late at night in a small studio I built in our upstairs bedroom. I was fortunate to have an amazing group of musician friends from Colorado who were now on the East Coast and would visit from time to time. During these initial recording sessions, they would join me to lay down the initial sessions.
Soon, life got in the way and I set the project aside to start The Community Music Space, a music school in Red Hook, NY that offers lessons, classes, and ensembles locally. I would revisit the songs from time to time but never got very far before teaching, family life, performing, or other projects took my attention. When I finally returned to the project, I was in a much brighter place. We had stumbled our way through Covid, we were alive, and I had built a solid recording studio at the school. I pulled the old sessions up as I realized that they still resonated and they sounded pretty good.
I believe that letting go is an essential final step in the creative process and I realized if I were going to get to recording to that next collection of songs I’ve written, I’d have to let these guys fly. I found I could bring these songs back to life in a way I couldn’t have imagined when I recorded them in the small upstairs bedroom. I enlisted a few great musicians who work at the studio to add some bass and drums, and the tunes sprang to life!
When I listen back, I realize that while the underlying mood of these songs comes from a specific, almost pinpoint moment in my life, the stories themselves represent a larger, more universal perspective. They are observations of the inevitable sense of futility we all feel from time to time, and specifically, they relate to men and our seemingly endless inability to adapt and understand the deeper emotional context of the world around us. These stories reflect our seemingly endless tendency to sabotage our own precious lives, in pursuit of some unknown conquest that most often doesn't exist.
Imagine a man, staring into the mirror, searching to find Joseph Campbell’s hero, overcoming some insurmountable odds only to see himself staring back; bemused, honest, sad, and broken. An honest reflection of who we thought we were, and who we have become. While we yearn for the grand achievement, journeying from humble beginnings to venture out into the world and return a hero, it’s the dude standing in the mirror looking back who most often has something to say.
As I release this small collection of songs, it is fitting that it should coincide with my youngest son’s senior year of high school. It does not escape me that this release represents the end of a particular period of my life. These songs represent a reflection of time that has come and gone, and I release them, in a way, to release myself.
I hope you give these tunes a listen. Maybe they’ll remind you of a time in your life when things were rough and you got through, and you can look back and say, I’m somewhere better or at least different now.
Finally, a massive shout to my beautiful wife Ana, my incredible boys, my “don’t call me mother-in-law” Aleida Sanjuan, my parents and their incredible, enduring lives, and my amazing group of friends who have been there every step.