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)

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 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

This was a show we played at my house in Davis, CA, in the fall of 2004. Our friends Gnartoon were playing first, but the cops came and shut us down within 15 minutes or so. Somehow, we managed to move all the gear and the entire crowd to a house down the street and Gnartoon was able to finish their set. Afterwards, everyone returned to the Pirate house to keep partying. Around 1am, it occurred to me that the neighbors were probably asleep, and by the time they woke up and called the cops, we’d probably be done playing. Jaizi, our drummer, had passed out already. She put on a bathrobe and stumbled to the stage in the living room. We played a short and tight set, and foiled the cops once again.

• It’s A Train
• C’mon Everybody (Eddie Cochran cover)
• Sodapop
• Don’t Break My Stuff