Main guitar: Artinger Spruce Double Convertible (“Spruce”). Studio amp rig [K&M Kimock prototype amplifier with a Universal Audio OX DI module and a ’63 Fender Vibrolux with a Royer R-121 microphone], with Mad Professor Simble pedal for the overdriven bits. As played at session, no overdubs or edits*. Last verse doubled in studio with a Scott Walker Electro guitar through Mike Beigel’s Tru-Tron 3x, his update of the classic Mu-Tron III. 

One of a number of tunes that started out as a loop in my looper. [a device that allows one to record into it for a period of time, then loop the result indefinitely, usually with the capability of adding other parts to the loop after it’s created] It’s appeared on a few different guitar demo videos I’ve done. My wife once told me that the song made her think of one of her friends strutting down the street in heels. By then it had already taken on the title, “Slinky,” which we altered slightly after the recording session, possibly in order to avoid legal hassles with Poof Industries but equally possibly as a nod to our in-house band name, Kang And The Hanging Chads. 

*When I say “no edits,” I mean “nothing more substantial than pitch-shifting a wrong note by a half-step or pushing a note just a bit more into correct time.” There are maybe five of those across all the tracks where I used the studio performance.

Main guitar: Koll Duo-Glide. Studio amp rig. Additional guitars, all done @ Kyngsland: Fender Mustang (’65 short-scale) for doubling of walk-up melody and last verse melody, also comping under guitar solo; Artinger “King Koa” chambered solidbody for doubling of melody in second verse and walk-ups. On the second walk-up there’s an Analog Man Astro-Tone fuzz on the koa Artinger.

One Sunday morning in my New Hampshire condo I was up on the third floor playing guitar. Playing has been my Sunday morning “church” for many, many years. Sally was on the first floor sipping her morning beverage and reading the newspaper. I wanted to invite her upstairs to join me. Instead of putting the guitar aside and walking downstairs, I decided to take the odd little chordal loop I had going and play a melody over it that would be so irresistible that Sally would feel compelled to come upstairs. It worked! This is that melody, although the setting is quite different from the original.

Main guitar: Artinger Spruce. As played at session, no overdubs or edits except the rhythm part under organ solo which was overdubbed in studio.

In terms of writing instrumental “songs,” I was influenced strongly by Leni Stern’s work in the 1990s. She wrote a book about composing in which she mentioned that, if she had her way, she would only write ballads. So she challenged herself to write a “note-y” tune just to shake things up a bit. That’s exactly the thinking behind this one. It’s clearly indebted to the wonderful “East Bay funk” music that came out of Oakland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to which the title makes reference, and where I spend a fair amount of time these days as my son and his family live there. The title also references the fact that my Durant heritage emanates from a fishing village on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Anyway, the tune is a great excuse to let the band cut loose a bit.

Main guitar: Artinger Spruce. As played at session, no overdubs or edits.

As I was writing this piece I heard that a classmate of mine from high school (a small boarding school in Delaware) had passed away. Although, as did many of us, I lost a few peers to drunk-driving mishaps when I was young, this was the first of my high school classmates to die of “natural causes,” in this case a heart attack at a still-too-young age. Not long thereafter Jon and I lost another peer and friend, a bassist we’d known since he and Jon were in high school together, also to “natural causes.” This song reflects the conflicting feelings we had, the pain of losing a friend way too soon, the memories of (in both cases) people who radiated life and joy, and the realization that we’re all only here for a limited time. Of course there’s also a secondary meaning for the title: some of the classic battles between famous rock stars regarding whose band is going to be first to go on…

Main guitar: Artinger “Kashu” [Sakash’ta NouPaul type]. Melody and solo as played at session. Rhythm under electric piano solo recorded @ the Kitchen; additional rhythm parts done later @ Kyngsland with GVCG Telecaster through the Fender Vibrolux. Steve dug out his crusty old Wurlitzer electric piano for this one, to further channel the Butterfield Blues Band vibe.

Another tune that started its life as a loop, in this case only the chordal walk-down that appears in the first half of the melody. I often use loops like that to practice soloing (or simply making melodies) over a chord progression that is a little outside my comfort zone. Later on it evolved into a minor blues thing. What I typically played over it while practicing made me think of the off-center chromatic things the great blues guitarist, Michael Bloomfield, would play when he got wild and crazy (or simply didn’t know what else to do). One night before a gig with my trio the bassist told me he wished I’d start the first set with a blues instead of Come Upstairs. At the next gig I showed up with this tune written out on a lead sheet. Minor blues, simple enough, right? Nope. That descending chord thing foxed him, and it foxed pretty much everyone who tried playing it with me. One evening at Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch, while sitting around playing guitars in Steve Kimock’s session, Steve asked if any of us had anything we were working on. I ran this tune by him. Immediately he latched onto the descending chord sequence and said, “You didn’t finish the line!” The next morning over coffee I sat down and finished the line. This band jumped all over it as if they’d been playing the tune for years. Thanks, Steve!

Main guitar: Artinger Spruce. Mad Professor Simble for overdriven parts. Melody, solo, & comping under Steve’s solo as played at session. Overdubbed background guitar parts done post-hoc @ Kyngsland with Teuffel Niwa guitar, Telonics volume pedal, and Strymon Volante delay.

This was one of the first couple of demos I did in my original studio in the NH condo. It was always a fun tune to play with my groups because it actually was straightforward. Just a simple groove, like something Steely Dan might have played in 1975. It was the first tune we recorded for this session, and by the second take I knew that I had found the right band. “Plugged In” was the working title for this record for a long time, as the tunes on my first record all started life as solo acoustic guitar pieces and it was clear that this one was going to be all electric, all the time. 

Main guitar: Koll Duo-Glide. As played at session, no overdubs or edits.

The most recently-composed of this whole set of tunes, this appeared more-or-less whole one day. I might have labored a little bit over the B section and David Torn gave me a small but very helpful suggestion regarding the transition back to the A section, but for the most part it felt like the tune wrote itself. It took me a long time to find the right title, though. Even at the session it still bore the provisional title “Mr. Green Guitar,” which refers to my weird predilection for green guitars, but also to another favorite guitarist, Grant Green. I had only played it live with a band once but I knew right away that it was a strong tune by how the players in that band responded to it. The same thing happened at this session. As it was going down I had chills, and I still had to play! One of the thoughts I had when listening to the whole set of tunes after the sessions, and with this one in particular, was that I wished I could share them with my maternal grandfather, a church organist, choirmaster, carillonneur, and music teacher. Which led me to thinking about all the musicians who have populated that side of my family tree over many generations. Hence, “Ancestral shadows.” 

Main guitar: Artinger Spruce. Redone in studio on last day of session. Lead & solo guitar: PRS “KingsleyDGT,” done post-hoc @ Kyngsland with K&M Kimock lead channel. No pedals on this one!  

The first tune I wrote for what eventually became this record. At the time I was separated from my first wife and living in a walk-up winter rental apartment in York Beach, Maine. I’d been listening to Johnny A as well as another local guitarist, Bobby Keyes, who plays in a similar pop-jazz style with a guitar-bass-drums trio. Their music made me think there is a place for guitar-centric music that isn’t so aggressively virtuosic and heavy-sounding as most of the guitar-oriented music that came out in the 1980s and 90s. I played this one often in a trio format. The guitar arrangement was denser, in that I had to cover both the chords and the melody during the body of the tune. I was happy to relinquish some of the responsibility for filling out the body of the music to Steve Hunt! I’ve always heard it with kind of a gospel feel, hence the title, and in this version the chorus has the feeling of affirmation that I get from great gospel music. Steve’s ripping Mini-Moog solo is the cherry on top of the sundae, and it inspired me to get out of my comfort zone and play something a little more aggressive in response. Not that I’ll ever be mistaken for a “shredder”!

Main guitar: Koll Duo-Glide. Re-tracked post-hoc @ Kyngsland, although the guitar solo in the body of the tune is what I played at the session. Theo Hartmann flanger on for the “harp harmonics” bits. Main guitar on end jam is the Duo-Glide, as played at session but re-assembled by JD as noted below. Also appearing on the end jam is my Artinger “Flaming Charlie” lap steel through the Kimock amp in tone-stack bypass mode. Additional guitar overdub on transition between the guitar solo and the last verse: PRS Single-Cut Hollowbody Spruce, with Nashville stringing and both piezo and magnetic pickups active. 

Another tune that dates back to that first studio. The idea for the whole song was clear in my head from the day I wrote it. The title, as well. But I’ve played it many times, with many different versions of my band, and every band seems to hear and feel it differently, even from gig to gig. The rhythm and groove, in particular, have been dramatically different every time this tune has been played. The tune has gone in some innaresting directions but it’s never quite come to life in the way I envisioned it until now. In the actual session, the jam at the end extended quite a bit longer than it does here. Too long, really, although a “Producers’ Cut” exists so that version should eventually see the light of day. I’ve always been fond of what I call “receding parade” endings, such as the ones on certain Beatles songs (“Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lovely Rita” in particular) and had done something like that on a couple of demos of this tune. Jon took that concept and ran with it. He created a wonderful psychedelic collage with all the elements we’d given him, including the various extra guitar parts I’d recorded post-hoc. Steve added his keyboard parts to the edited version and worked with Jon to do a couple more minor structural edits. The rest of the arrangement is as we did it in the studio. For all it’s been through over its life, the end result is very much what I heard in my head when I first wrote the tune. 

Main guitar: Artinger “Lily” [my signature Retro Sport model]. Re-tracked in its entirety post-hoc @ Kyngsland. Studio amp setup with Analog Man Astro-Tone fuzz on coda. Supro Supreme [c. 1955] lap steel at very end of tune. Yanuziello electric 12-string underlying the whole tune. Whereas every other tune was played live to a naked click track, this track was played to a scratch 12-string part. We never saw fit to redo that part.

Another tune that evolved from a loop in my looper. The chords were all built on the voicing of the last chord of Pat Metheny’s wonderful tune, “Bright Size Life.” At first the whole tune was just a repeating cycle of the main melody with solos over that same chord cycle. At some point I realized it needed something else. I wrote the coda one night while alone, in a very funky/somber frame of mind & heart, in a hotel room somewhere in Fucking Georgia. That gave the tune some drama which it had previously lacked. When Jon and I were going over the tunes and talking about arrangements, he suggested using the chord progression from the coda as the climax of the solos. Another small but brilliant arrangement suggestion. The title, in addition to being excerpted from an old expression, makes reference to a bar in Decatur, Georgia where I happened play at a jazz jam a couple of times while in the general vicinity for work. Which is the reason I happened to have a guitar in my hotel room the night I wrote the coda.