In February, 2010, my daughter, Jackie, asked me to write a song for her wedding. Within minutes, I found myself arranging, performing, recording, and producing this song, dedicated to the marriage of Jackie and Chris. The melody, harmonies, and instrumental accompaniment emerged spontaneously from an unknown interior source. One can hear my mic'd steel string Taylor acoustic alongside the electrified tones of my Gretsch White Falcon. Jackie and Chris are soon to seal their mutual pledge of love and devotion, in the warm presence of their friends and family. They will embark together, with even deeper intensity of trust and affection, into a brave new future.
today is a day of remembrance, a day of mixed feelings of sadness, horror, anger, grief, and loss, in response to those irreversible and unspeakable actions and events that occurred in downtown manhattan, on 9/11/2001. The psychological trauma remains vivid in the minds of those still grieving from their losses, in those who survived in the immediate vicinity of the devastation, in those who had the tireless strength to help in the months of the aftermath in the clean-up process, and in those who are now ill from the toxic exposures to the particulate matter in the air of the ghastly environment. I dreamt on that Tuesday night of 9/11 that I emerged from a downtown subway, that the city air was black, that there was a fiery furnace of desolate destruction; and I awoke realizing that the dream was true. I completed the song "Somebody's Lover" 7 years after 9/11, and, though my family was spared any personal loss, it took me 7 years to express musically, what I had not been able to verbalize.......pjs
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It looks like we have about 30 diverse tracks for "Flying To The Sun", and there remains the challenge of finding the best, acceptable mix, trying to include various elements that will not drown each other out, placing the vocals and instruments in various proportions, positions, volume,EQ,effects,etc.The process is challenging, and the choices are often made by a 'feel', simple reflections of one's personal tastes, with some basic acoustic rules.
For all of you who are waiting with baited breath (eeuuwww), I am hoping to start mixing my latest 2 songs. With help from a guest musician, Greg Gibaldi, we recorded some additional tracks for bass guitar and keyboard. There is a lot to choose from, and to balance, and I think that a good time will be forthcoming, when we blend all the elements together; I hope that you will hear some astonishingly pleasing mixes................pjs
It was a snowy, rainy, icy, windy Winter in the suburbs just outside of New York City, yet it was a blessing in disguise, a silver lining, a luck-of-the-draw, an opportunity-knocks, an all-things-come-to-those-who-wait season, for this cliche-ridden, part-time, free-lancin', good-as-his-last-game, song-writing, unnecessarily verbose guy, often fondly referred to as "me". With so much extra time, watching the white snow, watching the Winter unwind, feeling the virgin, crystalline flakes mock me, as I stared out my window at the icy streets, I took a 3 minute, 3 verse song, and stretched it, and stretched it, and stretched it even more, to its present status of grandeur, a 17 verse tune, over 9 minutes, 30 seconds, from beginning to end, capturing more than a few moments in time; check out these raw track clips, blemishes not excluded...........