01 In The Dark
02 She's A Runner
03 The Pursuit Of Happiness
04 Everybody Wants You / Too Daze Gone
05 The Stroke
After walking away from the music business in 1993, I barely touched a guitar for three years. Aside from working on the Reach For The Sky anthology, I really didn’t want anything to do with that scene anymore. Two events then occurred that presented me with an unexpected and welcome musical challenge.
Towards the end of ’96, I slipped back into creative mode to write a poem for my two-year old godson’s birthday. When I showed it to his mother, she suggested that I put it to music. This was interesting because the verse was somewhat free-form, so I had to figure out a way to create a song-structure that would accommodate the lyric rhythms I’d already put in place. When it was done, I threw it down on a cassette-recorder I had lying around the house, made a copy for Harrison, and forgot about it.
In ’97, I was contacted by VH1 and asked to be part of a special they were doing on 80's artists. When they told me they’d like me to do a couple of songs live for the show, I replied without hesitation—that I would do so only on the condition that I perform without a band (solo). They agreed and I panicked. How was I going to do The Stroke naked ? The answer came to me while running on the beach several weeks later: I suddenly realized that, once you stripped away all the bombast and production tricks, The Stroke was a blues song. I went home and began messing around with some open tuning variations and voila.
Now that I had two acoustic songs, the idea of doing an unadorned CD of like-minded material presented itself. I was pretty irritated by what I perceived was happening in music at the time, what with everybody slapping samples together and pretending to be musicians whether they could play an instrument or not. I thought it would be a challenge to write and perform songs that would rely solely on my abilities as a songwriter, singer and guitar-player…without the cover of production gimmicks or bloated arrangements. I began by looking for acoustic guitars that inspired me with their natural voices, and I employed special tunings in response to each one’s characteristics.
This took me well out of my comfort-zone it’s not unlike learning a new language but led to many musical discoveries and new song directions. Happy Blue is the product of six different guitars that I collected for the purpose of making this CD. It is a live album, although it wasn’t recorded in front of a live audience. I put some very basic recording equipment in my NYC apartment and did about half of the tracks there, using one mic for both vocal and guitar. For the VH1 sessions which included Inferno. I chose to record at IIWII Studios in Weehawken, NJ. I really liked the vibe at this place, and ended up doing a bunch of other songs there as well. Two remains in its original demo form.
All in all, a very satisfying project.
Front
Back
Tray
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