For the last month or so, I’ve been playing music with Greg Hagel on drums, keyboards and vocals, and Pedro Hernandez on bass. I’m super excited about how it’s been going. I’m not sure how much I should be sharing here, I’m afraid that if people listen to these rough, first-take demos, they’ll assume that this is what we sound like in perpetuity, when in fact, we’re going to get better. But truth is, I’m so stoked on these songs, I’ve been emailing the demos to friends anyway, so I figure I may as well share them here. So, keep in mind, this song was recorded on a cell phone.

• The Book I Read (Talking Heads cover)

This is a show that I played with Jerry Encoe (Residual Echoes, San Francisco Watercooler) on electric guitar. Also playing the show was Jake Mann and the Upper Hand, and I think it went pretty well. See for yourself, I suppose. This might be the last time I play this acoustic material for a little while, now that I’m working with a new rock band.

• Laundry Day
• Galilee Hitchhiker
• The Moon
• Jesus
• Gin & Lime
• New Brown Jacket
• There’s a Place

Photo by Craig Fergus

This is something me and Keith the dog used to do, to pass the time. Actually I think this was when Mikey was in Hawaii and I was dog-sitting. We had a lot of time on our hands.

In the summer of 2007, I traveled back to Davis, CA to work with Andy Pastalaniec and Teddy Briggs on recording some of my new songs. We spent two weeks down in the basement of Freeborn Hall, recording tracks at KDVS’ Studio A. We got ten or so songs tracked with bass, drums, and acoustic guitar. I took the recordings back to New York and worked for a couple of months on adding electric guitars and vocals. In December, Sholi stayed at my place in New York while they played shows. While they were in town, bassist and wizard Eric Ruud mixed the recordings, and now we were cooking with gas! I took the bus up to Boston, where my sister Rachel sang some vocal harmonies on some of the tracks. I burned a few CDRs and traveled back to California to play some shows with this band and get the music out there. I don’t think we sold a single CD at the shows (OK, maybe we sold two), but the shows were a blast, and hopefully there will be more. Til then, here are the recordings.

• San Francisco
• New Brown Jacket
• Party On The Roof
  
• Money Off My Mind
• There’s A Place

This was at Pete’s Candy Store, in Brooklyn. It was a very small stage and we had six people in the band at this point.

These are a few songs I wrote when I was laid up in bed, recovering from a broken back. It was a relatively bleak time, as the songs’ subject matter demonstrates, but playing music definitely helped.

• Cigarettes in Bed
• I Hear the Stairs
• The Moon
• Let it Go
• Hey Joe
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This is a song I started working on in the summer of 2006, when I was living in Brooklyn. I wrote the melody and some of the chord changes there, but couldn’t find the right words for it. The band I was playing with at the time was called the Wild Kindness, and we were about to play a bunch of shows across the country. With a week before we hit the road, I started working on some recordings, so that we’d have something to sell at the shows, maybe make a little gas money. The problem is, we only had one new song. I started recording this song, playing the bass and guitars myself. I don’t play drums, so I recorded each drum individually, and then edited the recordings on the computer, shifting around each drum hit to sync them to the beat. At about 2am, I had a recording I was pretty happy with, but still no lyrics. I was drinking a bottle of gin, and I started singing lyrics off the top of my head. I didn’t like the words too much, but I was thinking it would be a placeholder vocal track, something to hold the song together until I could come up with something better… I never really did.

• Gin & Lime