Liner Notes

Somewhere around tenth grade, in the late 1980s, inspired by the guitar work of David Gilmour (specifically on “Wish You Were Here”), I bought an acoustic guitar. It was a cheap thing that cost a hundred bucks brand new, and the action was so bad that you had to press down really hard to make the notes and chords. In my silly young mind, I thought that if I practiced twelve hours a day every single day, I’d be better than Gilmour, and even Jimmy Page, and maybe even Hendrix, in a couple of years.

Having a way with words, I eventually started writing songs, but they were mostly rambling nonsense, though a couple survived. One of them, the first fully complete song I ever wrote was in 1990 titled “That Boy Can Drink”, which sounded like a Kris Kristofferson throwaway written after a night of hard drinking. In 2010, I recorded a demo of the song. In December 2023, I recorded the acoustic intro, some blues thing like I used to practice back in the day, then recorded the rest of it several months later. In 1990 I had also written a song titled “Claustrophobia”, of which the lyrics were so bad that I destroyed them decades ago, but a couple of the lines remained in my head and I used them in the version that appears on this album.

Around 2009, after burning out as a journalist, my creative energy turned back to music. I started writing songs, but, again, I struggled with the form. I was never much of a poet and was more comfortable writing prose. I wrote about twenty songs between 2009-2011, four of which appear on Songs From the Barn: “Lonely Desert”, written during a trip to the remote desert in southern California; “I Saw Leonard Cohen in a Bookstore”, written after awakening from the dream that is described in the song; “Who Are You, Little One?”, about a child lost during a failed pregnancy; and “I Cried”, about a lonely ferry ride home at the end of an epic romance.

In the winter of 2024, after completing my collection of short stories, “The Greater Massapequas”, I stopped writing prose and started writing songs. Something had changed, and, for a two-month period, the songs were falling out of me onto the pages of my five-subject, college-ruled spiral notebook. In thirty-plus years I had written barely over twenty songs, but, over the next two months, I wrote 130 of them before the tank went dry.

Then the Sam Ash music store chain announced that they were going out of business and that everything must go. I went to our local store and bought an Ibanez electric guitar, a bass, and an amp for each. Not totally sure of what I was doing, I began recording. I started with the old songs first, which I felt was not the best material. It was a grueling process, locking myself in my home office with the A/C and overhead lights turned off to minimize background noise. I didn’t realize how old school I was by recording all the tracks first with the plan to mix everything later.

After the old songs were recorded, I picked out some of the more eclectic new ones, which would fit best with the old tunes. To my surprise, one of them, “Electric Bed”, sounded like a retro pop/dance tune. “Bakery Girl” was drawn from a brief moment 35 years ago when I had finished my shift at the FoodTown supermarket frozen food aisle and made eye contact with the cute girl who was working at the bakery, which, at the time, prompted me to imagine what an entire life with her would be like. “The 4^th of Eureka” is an old poem I wrote about a failed Independence Day celebration and recorded in the boozy style of the record made by Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen in the late 1950s. “The Greater Massapequas” is a rap song originally written as a promotional piece to accompany my collection of short stories of the same title. “On a Hillside Beneath the Power Lines” was inspired by a spot on a hiking trail in upstate New York where we used to partake in psychedelic adventures. “Earl Anthony” was a tribute to the bowler I used to watch when I was a kid on Saturday Afternoons during ABC’s Wide World of Sports. “Bread Butter Blues” was written in the style of raunchy old blues songs.

So, after 35 years and several seismic shifts in the music industry, Songs From the Barn now exists, and the old tunes I had been sitting on for so many years, along with a few new ones, are out in the world. I wish them well and hope you enjoy one or two of them. ▪

Tracks

1. On a Hillside Beneath the Power Lines
2. Electric Bed
3. Bakery Girl
4. Earl Anthony
5. The Greater Massapequas
6. The 4th of Eureka
7. Bread Butter Blues
8. Lonely Desert
9. I Saw Leonard Cohen in a Bookstore
10. I Cried
11. Who Are You Little One?
12. Claustrophobia
13. That Boy Can Drink