Just ten weeks ago, I was enjoying Key West with some old friends. Today, it's being battered by Hurricane Irma, as is the rest of Florida. Considering I've got quite a number of friends and family in the state, and I'd like to visit the Conch Republic again sooner rather than later, I'm hoping that FL fares better than some of the islands in the Caribbean did last week.
Rhonda and I saw Roger Waters perform at Newark's Prudential Center last Thursday, and I'm gonna say it was one of the five or so best concerts to which I've been. And I've been to a lot. Pink Floyd's The Wall has always been one of my favorite albums (the favorite for a long time), and of course Roger is responsible for the bulk of it. On this current "Us + Them" tour, he plays a good mix of Floyd's music, though only a handful of his solo tunes, and those only from the new album (Is This the Life We Really Want?, which is also an excellent piece of work). I'd have loved to have heard more from The Wall, but I've got no complaints about the music, the band, the multimedia, or the lasers. :-D (As always, pictures are in my Gallery... of Death!)
Over the next day or so, I started thinking about my own song, "Hole in the Wall." I came up with the idea and wrote a few lyrics for it waaay back in 1991, finished them ten years later (with a bit more experience in the subject matter), and figured out the music in time to record it for 2004's Joy in the New. The song, of course, is my interpretation of something that wasn't on The Wall but should have been. When I was deciding what was going on last year's I'll Live and what wasn't, I knew I wanted to remix "Hole" and include it on the new album.
The thing is, though... I'd never played the song on guitar since first recording it in the summer of 2003. Not at any of the Make Music New York shows I did, not at home in the privacy of my own living room. While it's not an especially complex song, it is layered, and I guess I just never thought to try to summon the tune from just a single guitar. And so I quickly forgot exactly how the song went, and didn't bother trying to find out. Until Saturday.
Now that I have worked the sound out again, perhaps I'll come up with an arrangement that lends itself to one guitar. At any rate, I threw together a 'vlog entry, coincidentally the first new one in exactly five years, yesterday featuring a little bit of me playing the song on my Kona and Danelectro guitars, and a bit from the recording...
And this is where it all comes around again to hurricanes. CDBaby, which I've used to distribute both Joy in the New and I'll Live, announced last week that the net proceeds of all digital sales through the site this week, between Monday the 11th and Friday the 15th, would be donated to helping victims of Hurricane Harvey. Sounds like a good deal to me, so if you're interested in my music at all, this week would be a good time to buy I'll Live from CDBaby here. I've got friends in Texas, too (no exes that I know of, though), and while they got away mostly unscathed, I know Texas and Louisiana suffered a lot from Harvey. Let's hope Jose and Katia, the next two hurricanes lined up, don't pack as much of a wallop as the last two did, and let's also not forget that it's not just Americans, and not just the continental U.S., being affected by these monster storms.
Check out 'vlog #10 below, and again, please consider buying I'll Live:
Rhonda and I saw Roger Waters perform at Newark's Prudential Center last Thursday, and I'm gonna say it was one of the five or so best concerts to which I've been. And I've been to a lot. Pink Floyd's The Wall has always been one of my favorite albums (the favorite for a long time), and of course Roger is responsible for the bulk of it. On this current "Us + Them" tour, he plays a good mix of Floyd's music, though only a handful of his solo tunes, and those only from the new album (Is This the Life We Really Want?, which is also an excellent piece of work). I'd have loved to have heard more from The Wall, but I've got no complaints about the music, the band, the multimedia, or the lasers. :-D (As always, pictures are in my Gallery... of Death!)
Over the next day or so, I started thinking about my own song, "Hole in the Wall." I came up with the idea and wrote a few lyrics for it waaay back in 1991, finished them ten years later (with a bit more experience in the subject matter), and figured out the music in time to record it for 2004's Joy in the New. The song, of course, is my interpretation of something that wasn't on The Wall but should have been. When I was deciding what was going on last year's I'll Live and what wasn't, I knew I wanted to remix "Hole" and include it on the new album.
The thing is, though... I'd never played the song on guitar since first recording it in the summer of 2003. Not at any of the Make Music New York shows I did, not at home in the privacy of my own living room. While it's not an especially complex song, it is layered, and I guess I just never thought to try to summon the tune from just a single guitar. And so I quickly forgot exactly how the song went, and didn't bother trying to find out. Until Saturday.
Now that I have worked the sound out again, perhaps I'll come up with an arrangement that lends itself to one guitar. At any rate, I threw together a 'vlog entry, coincidentally the first new one in exactly five years, yesterday featuring a little bit of me playing the song on my Kona and Danelectro guitars, and a bit from the recording...
And this is where it all comes around again to hurricanes. CDBaby, which I've used to distribute both Joy in the New and I'll Live, announced last week that the net proceeds of all digital sales through the site this week, between Monday the 11th and Friday the 15th, would be donated to helping victims of Hurricane Harvey. Sounds like a good deal to me, so if you're interested in my music at all, this week would be a good time to buy I'll Live from CDBaby here. I've got friends in Texas, too (no exes that I know of, though), and while they got away mostly unscathed, I know Texas and Louisiana suffered a lot from Harvey. Let's hope Jose and Katia, the next two hurricanes lined up, don't pack as much of a wallop as the last two did, and let's also not forget that it's not just Americans, and not just the continental U.S., being affected by these monster storms.
Check out 'vlog #10 below, and again, please consider buying I'll Live:
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