It took a while to put this one together but I think it turned out kinda cool. Lately I’ve noticed the glaring similarities between this line of work and the life of a traveling salesman… recorded in room 123 at the Holiday Music Motel…

here are the words

________
i guess i’m lost on the trail, thought i knew what i was after but i’m just swinging in the air
are we better off aimless and out of luck? cuz maybe we’re just too drunk on the thrill of the hunt…
now we’re living show to show and apartments come and go
we never take it slow. we’re just burning up the road
now i got the strangest cough. when i told you everything would be alright, baby i was wrong
i guess i’m lost lost lost. i guess i’m lost with a snake-oil salesman’s job, just slitherin’ along
_________

I got to participate in a songwriters week held there last week (Dark Songs). It was the 3rd event like it I’ve been to. Seems like I was able to churn out a lot more ideas in the past but this last week I felt totally unproductive and stalled out for the most part. I managed to finish this tune but it was something I had been messing with for a couple weeks so I didn’t get my co-write on as much as I wanted to. Working with Heidi Spencer was really cool though. She sings on it and we did another tune I really dig called “2 Saloon Ghosts” that we have to record still…

wrote this one on tour last month…

Bourbon St.

walk along the cobblestone, late night lights and halfway homes
breaking bottles and the drone of button accordion and saxophone
diesel fumes conceal the moon like last night’s mess with cheap perfume
where pickpockets move with shameless means
ain’t it hard to love on bourbon st?

dirty decks of playing cards, all-night-girls and after bars
surly drunks with bloody teeth and restless dreams in tangled sheets
heard every hard luck story twice, been held up with a pocket knife
it’s a flighty and nightly new year’s eve
it’s hard to love on bourbon st

see it in every junkie’s stare,
in every cheap motel in disrepair
every homeless kid with matted hair
spare-changin on the quarter pier
in every hustler’s smile with silver teeth
where every band’s setlist is a tired routine
what a wonderful world, brown eyed girl
margaritaville and girl from ipanema  play on repeat
and it’s hard
it’s hard to love on bourbon st

never see the lights go dim or the street musicians pack it in
every night’s a saturday with deals to make and debts to pay
these girls are lonesome company with vices strong as the will to breathe
never finding time to sleep
it’s hard to love on bourbon st

So, in August John Statz and I set out for the 3 weeks and did 20-some shows through Canada and the Eastern US. It was a killer trip and I hope we can get back out soon. Check out John’s blog for some good photos and tour stories.

writing tunes at the Holiday Motel

Here’s a few of the tunes from this year’s Steel Bridge Songfest.  These are rough mixes but they’ll be touched up eventually.  Giant, oversized thanks to pAt macdonald, melaniejane, Christie Weber, Anna Sacks, Steve Hamilton and the Holiday Motel and the whole crew for putting us up for the week and being so hospitable and accommodating our crazy hours and hair-brained antics.

“Nothing Comes Naturally”

Wrote this real late the night after the fest with Dustin Welch, who is playing Dobro.

“Rattlin’ the Cage”

Wrote this  rocking little 5/4 ditty the first day of the Construction Zone with Christine Flores-Cozza and Loren Wollerman.  The band is Greg Roteik (bass), Adam Cargin (drums), me (gtr, vox, keys), Dustin Welch (banjo), Victor DeLorenzo (junk percussion) and Delaney Davidson did some slide trombone.  We recorded the drums, guitar, bass and vocals live! … which I love!  Band stuff has almost always been layered one piece at a time for me and it was a good feeling to be able to do it all live.  It’s not perfect but it’s got some teeth and it’s one unedited take of the rhythm section and main vocal.  Loren recorded some horn parts as well, which will be on the final version.

“Evidence”

I had this one completed coming in but still felt like it was missing something, a name…  Dustin aptly titled it “Evidence” and we went in and recorded it in the wee hours as things were winding down. This is a demo Shawn and I threw together in July.

The recording engineers at Steel Bridge are real champs.  We would be up with Steve recording at 7am and somehow he’d be ready to rock at 11am the next day.

Sometime a few months ago I got up, had some coffee and wrote this…   I think if it has a home, it is in a childrens movie.

Here’s a tune Robbie Schiller and I wrote sometime back in the fall and kind of forgot about.  We both really liked the words but couldn’t quite find the right arrangement.  We were playing some tunes the other day and decided to tinker with it a little more.  We changed the chords up and revamped the bridge and it turned out pretty cool with the help of an integral bassline on the guitar in the chorus and banjo part.   I’m starting to think that banjo makes everything better…

The bridge has some of my favorite lines in it:

When it starts to feel like ancient history you crane your neck for something you can’t see

You wanna climb the fence with a knife between your teeth but you just stagger drunk out into busy streets

courtesy of youbethemouse.blogspot.com

Here’s a new tune called “Skin to Touch”.  It was recorded by the all-knowing and ever-patient, Andy Hartman with one of the new projects I been playing with, Jeremiah Nelson & the Shifty Switches.

We’ll be at the Frequency on Friday March 6th with John Statz & the Cheap Shots, and Whitney Mann & the Boys.  10pm $6 – best time ever.

“Banjo means bathroom in Spanish” as Townes Van Zandt joked at at show once…

I always thought banjo had the most lonesome, ringing sound.  This one is called “Odessa Sand” and it was actually on the scrap pile until recently.  I wrote it on guitar but played it much more drippy and blandly.  I thought I would give it a whirl on banjo and I think it transferred beautifully.  My old neighbor on Jenny St., Clay Collins,  let me borrow his for a while so I’ve been arranging some tunes on it.  Something about the banjo really brings out the heartbreak in songs.

Geography

is what this one is all about, running into the same emotion all across the country albeit on a fictional trip.  I wanted to open the tune with a town I’d lived or spent time in but nothing fit the meter as good as Atlanta.  The next verse starts with my favorite line,

I miss the mountains like my Grandfather’s smile

Troubles all around me don’t seem worth their while

I wanted to evoke a geographically specific type of imagary in each verse so the next and final verse ends in Odessa, TX with carnitas, friholes and mezcal.

This tune is called “Drugs to make you sober”

This tune is called “the Daisy Chain”

It was my birthday

on Saturday – I’m 27 – and I threw together a show at the Reptile Palace in Oshkosh with the Love Badgers, John Statz & his band, This Bright Apocalypse and I opened the with a new outfit I’m calling the Mysterious Bruises.  Kiki Schueler happened to be hanging out and took some video of the show.

I’ve been doing stuff under the name Patchwork for a few years and I’m really itching for a change-up.  We pretty much do all new stuff, things written in the last few months.  I’m sure we’ll pull out some old tunes for all-nights slots but as of now it’s really fun to play things that I am not completely sick of…

The band is Shawn Drake (fiddle/vox), Matt Donoghue (bass/vox), Willy Schultz (elec. gtr) and me.  Laura got me a series of wonderful birthday presents including but not limited to the camo Miller High Life hat you’re seeing on the video and I think it made my voice twangier… and the show was a success!

that's my baby...

On tour

in August and September, I was able to just totally drop off the grid and spend my days driving and writing and my nights playing shows or relaxing.  I anticipated a few off nights and just blocked off the time to write.  I find it’s simply not worth it to stress out about trying to fill a date if it’s an off-night – you’re time would be better spent working on tunes or taking in some scenery.

This daisy chain tune I wrote while I was in Winter Park, CO hanging out before the show.  It was the first of a batch of tunes that came out of the trip.  I was coming off a month and a half of solid promotional-publicity bullshit that I totally hate doing for the new Patchwork record.  So it was good to leave my laptop and phone off for a while and get back into something with a little more soul.

The lyrics came fast

and the form is very concise, which is new for me.   I have had a problem with overwriting things to the point where nothing repeats and I am just now kicking it.  Shawn was saying last night how shitty it would be of me to give these songs to sing harmony on where they were just paragraphs without a single line being repeated.  It feels good to sing something that feels like it’s worth repeating AND something that isn’t weighted down by excessive emotional woes-me jibber-jabber.  After a while that stuff just feels completely expressionless,  you know?